A Pleasurable Headache - 31st May 2020
Updates
The non-fiction piece mentioned in previous updates is now a lock. After some excellent notes and suggestions it’s good to go. I shall reveal more details once everything is announced.
The last two weeks has also featured a bit of a spotlight on a previous project. The one shot horror-centric war comic I did with Gav Heryng, Disconnect, received a thoughtful and glowing review over at DrivingCreators.net courtesy of Tom Woodman.
Disconnect is available on ComiXology here.
Links
This edition was written mostly before the events in the U.S that continue to develop. If you’re able to, please read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This has happened before, it is happening now, and it will happen again until there is deep and real systemic change.
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Farewell to Beyond the Beyond
Bruce Sterling signed off on his long running blog, Beyond the Beyond over at Wired.
“I used to toss a lot of stuff into the blog that looked “funny,” but a lot of it was testing the very idea of significance. “Does this odd thing I found matter to anyone in any way whatsoever?” Will there be a public response of some kind to this? You can never get that response from a diary, a notebook, a studio corkboard. A blog, though, has an alternating current; so maybe some little meme will catch on and glow.”
What’s the Legacy of the Lost Finale?
Jen Chaney at Vulture picks over the Lost series finale ten(!) years on. Long time readers and acquaintances know I will go to bat for this series and finale every single time, so it’s nice to see the finale get some love and a little bit of a reappraisal in some of the articles popping up in feeds this week.
“No one does it alone, Jack,” Christian tells his boy. “You needed all of them. And they needed you.” In the end, Lost, above all other things, was about how crucial it is to love and have the backs of your fellow humans. I can’t think of a time where those words have been more applicable than right now, when we can’t beat a virus unless we’re all willing to put each other’s safety before our selfish, petty desires.”
What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions
“The country’s biggest exporting cartel, however, does not appear to have suffered. Members of Colombia’s Gulf Clan said they had been able to fall back on stockpiles built up before the pandemic, as well as coca leaves from smaller farms that are still functioning and don’t require a big workforce.”
“Members of the Kuna indigenous people are bringing drugs overland, making small boat runs up coastal waters. In the Darien Gap, a thick, mountainous jungle on the frontier of Colombia and Panama, cocaine is being hauled by caravans of up to two dozen backpack-toting porters.”
On the Many Mysteries of the European Eel
The life cycle of the eel is intricate, cyclical and fascinating.
“It can migrate thousands of miles, unflagging and undaunted, before it suddenly decides it’s found a home. It doesn’t require much of this home; the environs are something to adapt to, to endure and get to know—a muddy stream or lake bed, preferably with some rocks and hollows to hide in, and enough food. Once it has found its home, it stays there, year after year, and normally wanders within a radius of only a few hundred yards. If relocated by external forces, it will invariably return as quickly as it can to its chosen abode. Eels caught by researchers, tagged with radio transmitters, and released many miles from their point of capture have been known to return to where they were first found within a week or two. No one knows exactly how they find their way.”
How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing
Vince Bevins at NYRB on the shameful U.S foreign policy in Indonesia and Brazil during the 1960s. Both examples are just a small part of a larger system that has propagated and mutated from its postwar origins to the modern day ‘war on terror’.
“The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed— disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.”
The late William Blum’s Killing Hope still serves as one of the primary sources and guides to such policy decisions. It is a catalogue of destruction and violence that everyone should read if they want to understand the foundations of the world we find ourselves in.
Running in the Age of Coronavirus
Sports Illustrated on the legacy of Jim Fixx, his infamous book, and running during our present crisis.
“And yet, the book passages that resonate most now, as we hunker in our apartments and houses, battling anxiety, boredom and fear, are not the prophecies but the simple truths of the sport. “Only running can be done anywhere, requires practically no equipment and costs almost nothing,” Fixx wrote. “You can go out your front door right now and get started. You don’t need a bicycle, a swimming pool, a boat or a court. You don’t need a track, either; running can be done anywhere. I have run on paths, roads and highways, in parks and fields, and on the main streets of New York, London, Florence and Vienna. You can run at dawn, at midnight or whenever it suits your schedule and your fancy. I have run—and enjoyed it—in snow, sleet, wind and hail and on the most forbidding hot days of Florida summer.”
The Prophecies of Q
QAnon and the movement surrounding their conspiratorial and intricate missives are, unfortunately, one of the many symptoms of a sick and ambling disaster capitalism.
“The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.”
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See you in two!