nothing here but vanished rebel girls

issue 285 - 30th March, 2025

CJW: Hey all! Shorter issue this fortnight, with Dan taking a much needed break. But I think what we’ve got here is very worthy of your time.

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The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, itty bitty.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Biodiversity loss in all species and every ecosystem linked to humans – report - Phoebe Weston at The Guardian

Humans are driving biodiversity loss among all species across the planet, according to a synthesis of more than 2,000 studies.
The exhaustive global analysis leaves no doubt about the devastating impact humans are having on Earth, according to researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the University of Zurich. The study – which accounted for nearly 100,000 sites across all continents – found that human activities had resulted in “unprecedented effects on biodiversity”, according to the paper, published in Nature.

Surprising no one. I say that, but we all know it’s not humans per se, but rather industry and capitalist excess.

Geopolitics & Empire

Protest crackdown: How Australia became a police state - Charlie Lewis at Crikey
"As Israel’s genocidal war resumes in Gaza, entire families are being exterminated amid the bombardment, with family homes becoming family graves. Survivors tell Mondoweiss most of the dead are women and children." - A child in Gaza watched his mother burn alive. Then he died too. - Tareq S. Hajjaj at Mondoweiss

Society & The Culture

CJW: Degendering and Racialization - Talia Bhatt

Interpersonally, racialized degendering functions as a means of designating a target for both racialized and sexed violence. A racialized woman is degendered not due to an authentic confusion about her gender, but to eject her from the category ‘woman’—patriarchally understood as lacking in agency, desire, or autonomous capacity—and regard her as a brutified, bestialized threat. Contrasted against hegemonic womanhood, assailants are provided a ready casus belli, their violence against her authorized and justified as the necessary defense of patriarchal property against the external Other. Her body, so marked, becomes an acceptable site of violence, for any who oppose her are acting in self-preservation, while any attempt she makes to preserve herself are interpreted as clear and overt signs of aggressive intent.
That, ultimately, was the sin Imane Khelif was made to pay for. No one who participated in her public humiliation had any concrete reason to doubt her sex. They did have a reason to want to punish her for trouncing a white opponent, though, and relished the opportunity to remind her of her station.

A really interesting piece from Talia Bhatt about the degendering of cis WOC (as well as its parallels [and differences] to attacks against trans women), using the bullshit surrounding Imane Khelif at the 2024 Olympics as a prime example.

CJW: The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Husband - Tyson Yunkaporta at Emergence Magazine

But that’s love magic for you—same as all magic, you can’t hold it and scale it for superpowers and domination or bend it to your will. It is not a resource you can extract and process with chemicals and labor, to add value to some bastard’s capital. Like time itself, you just flow with it until it’s finished with you.
Once you try to force or boss a being (either human or nonhuman), the spirit is gone from that relation. You can’t use magic or make magic; you can only swim with its currents, occasionally choosing which stream will take you. Such are the informatics of complex systems like land and sea and sky. People get excited about mycelia, but those are just the wires. Spirit is the signal.

There’s so much in this piece, it’s difficult to know how to summarise it. Maybe you should just read it?

I had to get permissions from Wakka Wakka people to carve with the wood of this species. But this particular tree was planted far from its habitat, much like I was/am/will be in my diasporic existence. So I also had to ask Djadjawurrung people if I could work with this tree that had grown in the wrong place on their land, then was cut down in the wrong season. It is also still green as I burnish it with a whale bone, so it hasn’t seasoned properly yet and will probably crack and split over time, but that is part of the story of entropy encoded within it. It is out of time and out of place, yet still accountable to the laws of physics, which makes it not much good for anything unless you want to use it to hack the enlightenment through a loophole in western scientific lore, in order to facilitate time travel. It is liminal enough to perform this function, as it sits in such bad relation that it barely exists at all.

You really should…

It is safe for me to share this psychotechnology because it cannot be weaponized—people of bad faith with extractive agendas of dominance and cruelty are incapable of love, and therefore incapable of time travel.

Books

MJW: Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna

I was never a huge Bikini Kill fan (I loved Hole and there was a definite line between the two bands, due to Courtney Love’s unprovoked attack on Hanna at Lollapalooza in 1995), but I’d rocked out to their songs now and then. I got more into them after seeing The Punk Singer, a documentary about Kathleen Hanna released in 2013. In her new memoir, Hanna tells the story of her music and activism. It goes deep into her trauma, her feminism, and the wins and fails of the Riot Grrl movement. It’s heavy at times, with Hanna’s own experiences, as well as the experiences of fans who approach her after shows to vent their trauma, seeing a kindred spirit in someone who can talk about the kinds of violence usually not spoken of. It’s the story of a woman who sees the injustices in the world and actually wants to work alongside her community to change them, which was refreshing, and felt still just as relevant today as ever.

CJW: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jiminez

This is one of the best sci-fi books I’ve read in a long time. It’s a mosaic novel, though the tiles are stretched across space-time and interwoven to tell a beautiful and utterly human story about connection and distance, and the pain and beauty inherent in the links we forge with one another across a lifetime.

Movies + TV

MJW: Adolescence

It’s the most talked about series of the year so far, what with the ‘manosphere’/incel themes, Owen Cooper’s breakout performance, and the phenomenal single shot episodes, but there were moments of Adolescence that felt really on the nose. Anyone who is up on the most basics of the current zeitgeist knows all about the fomenting misogyny creeping into everything, what it means, and what it does, so Adolescence wasn’t showing us anything new there. But not everyone remains as hyper-informed as others, and this is one of the jobs of popular media—to bring these themes to the general viewer, the kind of person who might not spend their time pouring over articles like SOME of us do. It’s the kind of show that starts conversations amongst families, and I guess that’s a good thing? It could have humanised its victim, Katie, a little bit, rather than portraying her as a one-dimensional bully-then-stabbing-victim, just a smiling picture on the news. But damn, the one-shot format was fucking impressive, especially in Episode 2, which takes place at a school with a cast of teenagers that must have been a nightmare to film, and ends with an epic drone shot.

Music

LZ: Eivør and Heilung

My bestie invited me to see this band live in Copenhagen last weekend. I never really paid much attention to them before, and I always mistook them with Wardruna, to be honest. But I'm so glad I joined her to see them and also Eivør as the opening act. Let me talk about her first, then.

Eivør does some kind of Nordic folk music with electronic and rock elements, but her voice is definitely the main instrument there. It's kind of funny because the band has this 90s industrial aesthetic when live, especially considering the keyboardist who was wearing a mesh bodycon top – so Lestat from Queen of the Damned, and Eivør herself had this massive blonde ponytail and was sporting a latex suit with big, pointy shoulders. Almost a tokusatsu vibe haha! It was a great performance, but I think I would like to see her in a more traditional set, like the first time I checked her music.

Then there was Heilung, and what the fuck! These guys know what they are doing on stage. It was really interesting to see them live after I myself have joined a shamanic retreat in Gothenburg last year. The retreat started with the two facilitators (two amazing witches all dressed up with long skirts, animal skin, and long dreadlocks) greeting and thanking the four cardinal directions and their related gods, and so did Heilung as an opening rite.

I don't even know how many people were on stage, but at least 15, some of them only performers who at some point appeared with shields and spears which they hit against the floor rhythmically, like in a battle chant. Of course, the main acts are “carried” by the main vocalists who are also some sort of lead shamans, these being Kai Uwe Faust and Maria Franz, who play this “divine feminine” and “divine masculine” couple and invariably interact like a couple, but mostly as conductors of their priestess and priests, as well as coordinating the army of topless men and women holding weapons and drums.

I wish I wasn't so far away from the stage, but despite that, the smell of incense took over the whole venue and you could see how Christopher Juul, who is responsible for the music and production, is also a quiet, but nevertheless strong leading force in the performance. It's hard to describe with words what you can experience mostly visual and audibly, but there's also the smell of burning herbs and the touch of the drums and the powerful voices that literally roar in your insides. I really needed to feel this, I really needed this sort of ritual, and I'm so thankful to have been there despite the motherfucking big heads in front of me (not quite transcended yet, as you can see).

Here are some videos to get an idea of what it looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PFz9FQsU8w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wy-W-pYlds

LZ - The mystical world of Fluisteraars: 'Our music is a battle against nihilism'

The article is in Dutch, but I think Google Translator does its magic here so we can understand a little bit of what's all about. Fluisteraars is an atmospheric black metal from the Netherlands. They almost never play live, but I had the pleasure of seeing them on stage last year when I flew to their country, or more specifically to Eindhoven, for Roadburn. There I could see them perform both their metal songs and the new ambient album. It's kind of obvious that I am more familiar with metal than ambient music, but both concerts were great. I only regret not having bought a patch…

Anyway, in this interview, we can have an idea of their themes – how they are using their songs to tell Dutch tales, but also create their own mystical stories that bring magic back to life. The artists behind the band mention how disenchanted our world is, how everything feels nihilistic, so their music is a pursuit of more meaning, connection, and sublimation. And I think it manages to do it very well. Despite the name of the band meaning Whisperers, it's in the guttural vocals and cold and massive guitar sounds that you can transport yourself out of this world. Here are my favorite songs:

Also make sure to check Bob's artwork, it's pretty interesting and goes very well in the opposite direction of what you would expect a black metal musician to visually convey: https://www.instagram.com/bobmollema/

The Self-Promotion

LZ - Mystical union of the sublime order

Boo! Here I am back to my Medium blog, writing a 17-minute-long piece on why I like all things dark, melancholic, dramatic, and goth. Last year, my life changed drastically and now I am living a very experimental and reflective period, which prompted me to connect a few dots that might only make sense in my head, but here’s the essay anyway. It’s about the concept of the sublime, horror movies as therapy, Eros and Thanatos, mystical ecstasies, dating apps, and attachment styles. Very contemporary, very millennial.