CJW: This issue, with Marlee off galavanting around North America, it’s my great pleasure to introduce Ganzeer as our very first newsletter guest.
The Team
Ganzeer (GZR) - Writer/Artist of graphic novel The Solar Grid, short fiction Times New Human, and several exhibitions scattered around the world. Based in Denver, Colorado for now.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature
John English (JE) - Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent
m1k3y (MKY) - Apocalyptic Wallfacer-Futurist. @m1k3y
Articles
CJW: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature” - Naomi Klein at The Intercept
Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”
Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the U.S. government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?)[...]
Why does it matter that Rich makes no mention of this clash [with neoliberalism] and instead, claims our fate has been sealed by “human nature”? It matters because if the force that interrupted the momentum toward action is “ourselves,” then the fatalistic headline on the cover of New York Times Magazine – “Losing Earth” — really is merited. If an inability to sacrifice in the short term for a shot at health and safety in the future is baked into our collective DNA, then we have no hope of turning things around in time to avert truly catastrophic warming.
If, on the other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the ’80s, but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism — one that was opposed by millions of people around the world — then there is something quite concrete we can do about it. We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its center.
Ah yes, human nature (whatever the fuck that means) and the royal ‘we’ - our two greatest enemies in the fight against climate change. I was glad to read this and see Naomi Klein kick back against this bullshit rhetoric. Normally, I'll blame boomers, billionaires, or capitalism itself, but here Klein makes a convincing argument that it's neoliberalism in particular that we can blame, not just for an increasingly unpredictable and extreme climate, but also for a lack of concerted effort to actually address human caused climate change.
It also made me think of how environmental “solutions” are continuously marketed to us as individuals, making us feel as though we need to do all the work of reversing climate change while mining, fossil fuel, and manufacturing corporations pour pollutants into the environment as a frankly disgusting rate.
But sure, let’s ban straws, and continue buying cheaply manufactured goods that we will discard when they break down because they were too cheap for us to give a damn. Let’s only look at the price tag on that pedestal fan instead of considering the environmental cost it took to produce it and then ship it halfway round the world.
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CJW: As California burns, many fear the future of extreme fire has arrived - Alissa Greenberg and Jason Wilson at The Guardian
The conflagrations have also spawned bizarre pyrotechnics, from firenados to towering pyrocumulus clouds that evoke a nuclear detonation. These events are not aberrations, say experts. They are California’s future.
There are a bunch of great (read: horrifying) pull-quotes to pull from in this article.
“The impacts from [climate change] will probably accelerate. There won’t be a new normal in our lifetimes.”
MKY: I have about twenty different versions of the above two articles open rn - there seems to have a been a glut of them this week, and I’d really like to believe we’ve reached a moment where people are ready to do something about fixing the planet, rather than hiding in our smartphones etc ad nausea… but honestly, as another pointed out, this shoulda happened in 1979 (callback to last issue: remember that scene at the beginning of s2 Utopia ???).
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CJW: The three-degree world: the cities that will be drowned by global warming - Josh Holder, Niko Kommenda and Jonathan Watts at The Guardian
Welcome to the latest edition of End of the World Watch.
MKY: omg i am totally in for a sequel to End of Watch where the surviving cops level up and form a .. global frequency… to police the transition of the world’s apex predators to a non-world ruining civilisation and use the cartel’s smuggling networks to repair ecological gaps by translocating ecological engineers/charismatic megafauna to habitats where they can thrive without fear of poachers and… sorry, wrong room.
AA: What does poaching look like in the world you describe above, MKY? I figure the closer we get as a species to a sensible equilibrium with our planet, the more intense (and lucrative) the exploitative side of our human nature will become… there’s kinda no hero less “problematic” right now than the Brave Eco-Warrior - some kind of anti-poacher/park ranger/habitat enforcer. Someone could really stand to give all those Ted K stan “treeaboos” someone more morally benign to cheer for…
MKY: that’s a really good question… and you’re not wrong.
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CJW: That Sinking Feeling - Charles Stross
Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well.
Note that this warning comes from the civil service, not anti-Brexit campaigners, and is a medium-bad scenario—the existence of an "Armageddon scenario" has been mooted but its contents not disclosed.
Charles Stross explaining the likely outcomes of a hard Brexit. In short: it’s very fucking ugly. I knew it would be a disaster, but I didn’t consider many of the things that Stross outlines here.
GZR: Can I just point out how gloriously ironic it is that the nations that were the ones to push “globalization” in the first place, are precisely the ones with rising currents advocating exclusionism? Like… just because they found themselves losing at the poker table they built and rallied people around in the first place?
CJW: I keep waiting for Australia to have its own dalliance with far-right politics, and then I remember that we torture refugees at off-shore detention centres, and have been doing it for the better part of two decades. And our less-Right Labor Party would be happy to continue this practice if they took power in the next election.
GZR: Nothing illustrates how royally screwed the world is right now more than the really horrible things done by not-far-right politicians. Like the refugee swap the Obama Administration brokered with the Australian government, whereby the U.S. would accept 1,250 asylum-seekers previously held in Australian detention camps in exchange for refugees from Central America held in U.S. detention centers (whaaaaat?).
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CJW: Evidence of 250 massacres of Indigenous Australians mapped - Calla Wahlquist at The Guardian
The disturbing revelations were released by the University of Newcastle on Friday as part of the second stage of its online massacre map, which now covers frontier violence that occurred from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 to the colonisation of the Northern Territory, South Australia and remote Queensland up to 1930.
Australia was built on murder, genocide, and theft. It has an endlessly racist past, and a disgustingly racist present. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant, or is happy with the way we have treated the Aboriginal peoples.
GZR: “But we brought them culture!”
MKY: -no words-
JE: Despicable. It is beyond comprehension that we have had no treaty or apology yet. It’s not likely to happen anytime soon with our resident posh turd Turnbull recently rejecting the idea of a referendum for an Indigenous Advisory Body to Parliament, stating it is neither "desirable or capable of winning acceptance". Great.
I did come across this kickass story recently about Jandamarra, a police tracker turned guerilla who terrorised the white colonists and earned a legendary status.
An excerpt from Wikipedia:
For three years, Jandamarra led a guerrilla war against police and European settlers. His hit and run tactics and his vanishing tricks became almost mythical. In one famous incident a police patrol followed him to his hideout at the entrance to Tunnel Creek in the Napier Range, but Jandamarra disappeared mysteriously.
Read the whole article here.
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CJW: Sorry to Bother You - an interview with Boots Riley - Chip Gibbons at Jacobin Magazine
Interesting point he makes about science fiction.
AA: What Riley said, for anyone who didn’t RTFA above:
“ I have a big critique of a lot of science fiction films — I think that’s where leftist writers go to hide.”
Which, yeah, might be pertinent to a few of us wot write this newsletter!
GZR: First off, if anyone reading this has not yet watched SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, for fuck’s sake drop everything and go now! NOW! It is hand’s down the best film I’ve seen in a long-ass time. To the core relevant and funny as hell, the pinnacle of a new wave of Concept Pop that’s been on the rise in recent years. And while being very relevant to the real world we live in, it operates according to its own surrealish logic, something that I’m not necessarily used to seeing in film as much as reading in comicbooks.
Re: interview above, *slow clap* for this bit from Riley:
Racism, or the creation of the idea of race and the racist ideas that formed around it, was necessary for the creation of capitalism.
And also:
All of that explains poverty as [a product of] bad choices. It gives an explanation for all of capitalism that even the white working class looks at.
Which is definitely an attitude I’ve found to be shockingly prevalent since moving to America.
Riley on Star Wars:
The Rebels were the Vietcong, the Empire was the US, and Darth Vader was their Kurtz.
I can totally see that. But it’s absolutely important to look at Star Wars and its legacy and attempt to understand why its effects became so far removed from its beginnings/intentions. I kind of disagree with Riley in that he thinks the reason is the story being so far removed from the real world. Take that exact same story, and how about NOT making the rebel protagonists all-white Americans? How about mixing them up and giving them accents that the average American often associates with the fearsome “other”.
What I find most disheartening about most any American cultural production with radical undertones is that more often than not, the ripple effects resulting from it are completely superficial. So Star Wars for example resulted in a whole bunch of space-opera knock-offs, latching on to the tropes (ie. planetary war, friendly droids, furry sidekicks, princess-types in trouble, etc.). Or take the kind of cultural impact that a film like The Matrix had (lots of leather and a fixation on bullet time?).
MKY: can’t wait to see SORRY TO BOTHER YOU and no idea when it’s getting released here :/
CJW: Yeah, Ganzeer, thanks for rubbing our Antipodean noses in it. (But yes, after this interview and everything else I've heard, I'm eagerly anticipating an Aus release.)
But to your last point, GZR, yes, I was thinking the same thing about The Last Jedi. The whole Space Monte Carlo subplot is basically anti-war, anti war profiteering, and vaguely anarchist… all this brought to us by Disney, a massive and massively conservative corporation (the same corporation that owns Marvel, who were literally producing a comic series with/for an arms manufacturer before people got wind of it and rightly asked “what the actual fuck?”). They will package our rebellion and our revolutions and sell them back to us if we let them.
And then the question of subtext and themes and authorial intent versus what people actually see in a work is something that I have Opinions on, because of Reasons, but that shit’s possibly too self-indulgent in a newsletter I'm always worried about dominating.
AA: It was interesting to see Riley using his platform to offer some practical advice about how to make the world a more equitable place - start with labour collectivisation close to home & then implement collective action. Boom! Makes sense. A lot of the time left-leaning public discourse tends to be broad, metaphorical and/or corrective (some might even say scolding), but I enjoyed Riley’s clearly expressed ideas about What It Is Exactly That We Can Do.
The movie sounds bloody good too - Lakeith Stanfield is excellent in Atlanta, and I’m interested to see how he carries a movie.
JE: I will round this off by also stating my lust to see SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. God damned if Lakeith Stanfield isn’t one of the best rising talents at the moment, he is sublime in Atlanta. Gotta do a write-up about that show soon.
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CJW: When a Stranger Decides to Ruin your Life - Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo
Every now and again you’ll find a horror writer lamenting the existence of smartphones, because they make their job harder, but stories like this one to me just seem to prove that our ‘very online’ culture just leaves a lot more options for completely nightmarish scenarios that can ruin a person’s life.
GZR: Man, just leaving the house without my phone is horrific! So if you really think about it, smartphones ought to be making horror even better, because just that element of not having your phone on you when you need it the most is such a horrific thought that so many readers/viewers will probably relate to it. Imagine just landing in a city you’ve never been, you’re counting on uber to get around, google maps to know where the hell you are, and you’re running down the alley escaping the weird SEWER MONSTER! You hit a dead end, it’s gaining up on you! You pull out your phone. Now… you can try to make a call or take a quick instagram shot… or you can toss your phone away because SEWER MONSTER EATS PHONE BATTERIES! Okay, so it’s eating your phone. NOW WHAT?!
Also (back to the story in the link above), no more arguing with people on the internet.
JE: This story does make you think twice about commenting on random stuff, which as the article states never achieves anything anyway.
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CJW: How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions - Jeff Maysh at The Daily Beast
Here’s something of a palate cleanser. This one has been doing the rounds, but it’s very entertaining. My favourite part is when these dickheads, who knowingly cheated McDonalds out of huge prizes, went and starred in commercials for the competition. Brazen.
JE: This is just a straight up solid true crime story, doubled down by the niche scam of corporate lottery. It's always fun to read a really good scam and this is an easy read. It is also in the works to be a major motion picture, which I could see working really well. Good Read.
Movies + TV
MKY: MANHUNT UNABOMBER
After last issue’s mention of the Cult of Ted K I remembered this show exists and am working my way through it. My initial reaction is that this is some weaksauce version of Hannibal - except as a culture we’re apparently fine with fetishing serial killers (I mean, I fucking LOVED that show and it’s the greatest romance of all time… but), less so um... radical critiques of industrial society.
Also Paul Bettany dressed as Ted K somehow looks exactly like Willem Dafoe to my eyes…
“Manhunt: Unabomber was the perfect breeding ground to introduce the ideology to suitable people” ~ https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unabomber-netflix-tv-series-ted-kaczynski man, i’m so outta the loop on this i didn’t even know about Prim Twitter 🌲.
Comics
GZR: Although I tend to fell in the Stan-Lee-sucks camp, and do find that he took way more writing/creating credit than he actually wrote or created, I do give him credit for being a relentless showman. He may not have had much of a hand in creating the Marvel Universe, but he certainly had the biggest hand in creating the Marvel brand, without which the Marvel universe simply wouldn’t exist. I suppose I’m thinking about this now because I can’t say that I really know anyone today who is as avid a promoter as Stan Lee was.
Here he is hosting his own talkshow as far back as 1968! With him on the show are a bunch of figures from the New York counterculture scene at the time. Here’s an audio recording of him giving a talk at Princeton in 1966 (I particularly love the audience’s reaction when he mentions Steve Ditko’s departure). Here he is being interviewed in 1975. Here he is with another talkshow of his own in 1976(with Roy Thomas), this one more comicbook focused. Here he is acting pimp as fuck on CBC’s Beyond Reason in 1980. Here he is in 1991 with a young Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld in another first of his own invention: a comicbook-focused VHS series called Comic Book Greats.
I suppose I’m taken by this because it’s clear that Stan Lee broke ground with his promotional efforts in more ways than one. And it’s very hard to find success as an artist (of any kind) without such vigorous effort.
CJW: I’ve sided with Team Kirby in the Great Comic Book Wars, but you make an interesting point. Even if you disregard all of Stan Lee’s creative credits, is his work as industry hype-man enough to cement his place in comics history?
AA: Has anyone embodied a corporate entity with more gusto and consistency than the legendary Stan Lee? He IS Marvel Comics, for better and for worse, a living metonymy for the Marvel™ behemoth, a useful and charmed appendage for the world devouring MegaCorp that will one day synthesise all culture and reprocess it as part of a 76-part shared universe narrative superstructure ...ahem.. yeah, Stan Lee is something alright...something possibly very EVIL!
All this Stan Lee chat reminds me of this recent article about Kevin Smith inviting Stan Lee to live with him. Maybe, now that Comic Book Men has been cancelled, this can be Smith’s next foray into reality television? Also, bringing this up gives me an excuse to show this photo from Smith’s instagram, an image which is both hilarious and inspiring.
GZR: Truth be told, that is hella inspiring. On a somewhat unrelated note, the relationship between comics and weight-gain is real folks. I can tell I’ve been putting on a few pounds since starting The Solar Grid.
But then again, it might also be the result of moving to America.
Podcasts
CJW: One of my all-time favourite podcasts is Love + Radio. Each episode is usually an interview with a person about some aspect of their life, but what each of these people have in common is that they’re an outsider, or their experience is something that falls outside the norm. But, Love + Radio episodes are few and far between. This is why I’m glad I discovered Earshot. It’s an (Australian) ABC Radio National production, with a similar sort of vibe to L+R. I wouldn’t necessarily say the people in these stories are outsiders to the same extent that the people featured in L+R stories often are, but they tend to be people who you might not see represented in the mainstream media - asylum seekers, queer parents, imprisoned fathers, and on it goes, each story told with pathos and integrity.
Just one more reason why we need the LNP to keep their hands off the ABC.
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MKY: Rune Soup
I am here for all in-depth discussions about AI that also talk about OOO.
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MKY: Are We Initiating The Great Anthropocene Speciation Event?
Not gonna lie, I was ready to hate-listen to this one, if only to know the mind of my enemies. When I first heard about the book this guy is elaborating from, my reaction was pure hostility, but now I’m like, ok he does make a few good points - esp in contrast to E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth. Like, this guy is pro hybrids and actually gives climate change some consideration. He also draws attention to teh shifting baseline problem (aka the myth of pristine nature) - which like seriously should be taught to humans of all ages. The rest feels like spin though… lotsa cherry-picked examples about how great human influence has been for biodiversity, so long as you don’t give it any more thought than that. (Like, is it also cool that AGW megastorms are blowing migrating birds dramatically off course? So long as they hybridize i guess…) Also couldn’t help thinking about that Ted K tv drama again - where he mentions (no idea if this is true) that his inciting incident was realising that the bird call he was enjoying was an imitation of a car alarm. Really though all this guy needed to win me over was to talk about Pablo’s Hippos.
GZR: Problematic at best. He’s basically saying: there’s evidence that humanity’s actions is the cause behind the creation of new species, which is a good thing even though extinction is happening at a far, far faster rate, because maaaaaaybe if things keep going the way they’re going we might end up creating more species than are going extinct (even though, there isn’t any evidence supporting that possible maybe). I do see his logic, mind you, but it is a logic centered around the idea that altering the planet to the human race’s favor is a good thing. First of all, it isn’t altering the planet to the human race’s favor that he’s arguing for, it’s altering it in favor of the industrialist human in particular (an existence heralded by a very specific –let’s face it– white human), as if that were the natural evolution of human existence (it isn’t), and that there needn’t be any way to critique our way of life or alter it (arrogant at best), but that we should carry forth with our very aggressive existence and allow the planet to adapt to our “needs”. I call bullshit because 90% of those needs aren’t needs at all, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be the ones changing instead (unless one was very insistent that European industrialization was good and necessary for the betterment of mankind, which is an argument that might stem from a somewhat racist understanding of things). Screw that guy. Read REBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE by Kirkpatrick Sale instead.
CJW: I just finished reading Star.Ships by Gordon White (no relation), and in it he talks about a tendency in archaeology, Egyptology, and other academic fields, to ignore evidence because it doesn’t fit with the accepted Modernist (or was it post-Modernist?) story that human civilisation has constantly been improving. In his book, White thoroughly tears that apart with a variety of sources, but it sounds like this is a similar line of thought, just in ecological terms. “Whatever happens to the planet and the animals on it must be good because we humans are doing it and we are fucking great.” Yeah, nah, fuck off. We’re a virus with shoes.
GZR: “We’re a virus with shoes.” – COREY! I’m totally stealing that! (Adding STAR.SHIPS to my increasingly menacing to-read pile)
CJW: I think that was Bill Hicks anyway, so steal away!
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AA: I enjoyed this mix by Philip Sanderson and DJ Huysmans, recorded to support the recent release of Simon Sellars’ book Applied Ballardianism. The mix includes music by the likes of The Velvet Underground, Hawkwind and Joy Division, interwoven with various Ballardian-themed samples and soundscapes.
Sellars’ book, which I copped in ePub form from Lulu here for around $13AUD, is described by publishers Urbanomic as such:
Fleeing the excesses of ’90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.
The book’s design is also very striking:
I’ve been following Sellars and his Ballard-related output via various blogs/social media feeds for years, and although I haven’t finished this book, I can safely say it is one of the most exciting things I’ve read in quite a while - Ballard’s work increasingly offers a prescient insight into our current condition, and Sellars re-contextualises and explores Ballard’s ideas in a thoroughly original way, with a focus on elements of Australian culture.
Apparently Applied Ballardianism fits into the genre of “Theory-Fiction”, which I was introduced to recently via my Twitter feed, with a very useful crowd-sourced reading list collated and published by user Gregory Marks aka @thewastedworld:
The screenshot above is only the first page of four, so hit the link for more examples of this heady mix of philosophy/theory and experimental fiction. I’ve only read a handful of titles from the list (Burroughs’ Invisible Cities, Eco’s Pendulum, Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, Borges’ Labyrinths ) but those all proved unique reading experiences, capable of creating a powerful frisson of ideas. I’m excited to delve into the rest of this list, although the idea of adding more books to my pile is, quite frankly, a Fucking Nightmare.
There are, I suppose, much worse problems you could have!
Tangentially related to this tangent’s tangent (sorry, I seem to have done a blog down here at the end of the newsletter), I would also like to mention this recent manifesto by @nyxlandunlife titled “TheoryPunk: Stealing Water From The Cathedral”. It advocates for the aggressive unbinding of intellectual/philosophical discussion and exploration from those institutions and conventions traditionally tasked with regulating (and restraining) it. Here’s a quote from the manifesto that resonated with me…. a definition of Theorypunk:
To hell with the humanities, to hell with academia, to hell with professors, to hell with canons, to hell with style guides, to hell with proper citation, to hell with grammar and spelling. Let a thousand blogs bloom!
GZR: Nothing relevant to add here, just wanted to thank Austin for the multiple treasure troves above!
Music
CJW: Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit (via Damien Williams)
This is absolutely incredible. For my money, the black metal aspects of the music are the least interesting part, but I am here for the weird, dark folk, blues, and gospel.
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JE: SISTER MARY - 7th Incision EP
Think golden era Low End Theory, with a little 2018 synthwave thrown in for good measure. Great post boom bap beats and grinding basslines. Made me nostalgic for 2010.
The Process
CJW: I feel like I’m pretty good at being open and honest about my struggles over at my website, and I know this is important. As detailed in this thread via Andrew Macrae in that second link, everyone struggles with various aspects of the craft and the business of writing. I figure, any writer who is looking to me for advice or inspiration might find solace in knowing that they aren’t alone in whatever struggles they’re currently facing.
The flip-side of that is something that kind of came to light reading this post on weekly notes, (via Dan Hill). Sure, there is value in being open and honest about struggles, but what about the other stuff? What about the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills? What about the weeks spent simply doing the work so one day you’d have a finished book/story/comic/film/song that you could finally talk about?
All this is to say… maybe I’ll start my own weekly notes? Because I need more ways to fill my time...
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CJW: Big thanks to Ganzeer for joining us this issue! It's been great.
As ever, if you like what we're doing here, please forward this issue on to anyone who you think might enjoy it, tweet about it, or print it out and mail it to your parents/grandparents. They'll be happy to hear from you (and probably very confused by the content).
Remember, it's a big weird world out there, and all we've got is each other.