Putin did 9/11, military decay, curriculum closure.
A different order of operations this week.
Brainfood
First up is this fantastic list from Vulture on the best neo-noir movies. There are some stone cold classics in here and some hidden gems I wasn’t aware of. I’d heard of Schrader’s Blue Collar before, but the description here and a viewing of First Reformed last week, mean I’m now actively seeking it out.
Go and check out First Reformed by the way. It’s not an easy watch by any stretch, but it’s a movie that grapples with the current existential drag and load of living in a time where we are actively killing our planet and future. How can we reconcile this with things like parenthood or, in the protagonist’s case, religious faith?
Ethan Hawke not being nominated for an Oscar for this was an absolute travesty.
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Another week, another article about curbing that smartphone addiction.
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Here’s a small selection of some short fiction I enjoyed in the last two weeks:
- Debtor’s Door by Sarah Cavar takes the fast flowing, always on world we currently live in and dials it up a notch with terrifying effect.
- Life Sentence by Matthew Baker posits a world where criminals have their memories erased. Can this redeem a person, or are we doomed to always find the grooves already worn into our souls?
- Finally, Ghosts of Bari by Wren Wallis is a beautiful piece of sci-fi. Whats starts off as a kind of locked room mystery in space becomes an excellent story about memory, defiance and storytelling. Highly recommended.
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Welcome to Zombieland is home to our post apocalyptic vibes this week. The above picture is a pack of wild dogs congregating around what was once a helipad at Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province, Afghanistan.
The base, left to Afghan forces, has now gone to seed in the wake of a logistical windfall and resources being stripped and taken elsewhere. The last line of the article says it all:
“Nothing we made over there seems to last”
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I highly recommend Richard Seymour’s Patreon page where he posts up longform essays about politics (mostly focusing on the UK). His latest post covers the staggering amount of cuts to the UK police force, and imagines a force more accountable to the public it serves.
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I’m not sure if the above video is some fourth dimensional chess meta-commentary by the NY Times or just an expensively produced piece of Russia-phobic horseshit. My Spidey sense tells me it’s the latter and got me suitably mad enough to write about it. I won’t bore you with the specifics here, so click through if you’re interested in me getting mad at the New York Times and the military-industrial complex as a whole.
Also, shout out to Standard Notes which is a joy to use.
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Updates
Issue #5 of Curriculum has concluded, something I thought I’d never say.
You can, of course, find that here.
It’s been cool to finally see this project out in the world. So much of comics (any creative endeavour really) is a slave to the twists of fate, disaster and opportunity. So when something does make it out into the world it’s a blessing.
I’m equally lucky to have had excellent collaborators on the project who all got into the spirit of the material and made it their own. A huge thank you though goes out to Ryan K Lindsay who got the ball rolling on this all those years ago.
We were brave and foolish, but we finally got it out there.
Now to get those next five issues out…
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Ganzeer has a new story at Times New Human (on which I’m the editor) up. Climate change, dead cities and great floods are all in the mix. Go see!
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At the moment I’m knee deep into spinning up another short (prose) story at the moment (the fourth of the year) with another one out for doing the submission rounds.
The immediacy compared to the comics creative process is quite stark. Yikes.
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See you in two!