Our Revolution... (video)

 

Our Revolution Will Not Be Illegalised

I am not a TV,

a CD, a TS, a TG,

a scam, a trap, a troon,

a 'huge problem for a sane world'

(though I may be a problem for you);

I am a biological woman

and my bloods will show you that's true,

but long before I got on hormones,

and long before you ruled,

I knew just who and what I was.

I knew it when I sang the words

to Jackie's Strength on my own in my room,

refusing the pull of my diaphragm,

sanctioning breath to my throat,

awake and alive and aligned with myself

in ways outside the scope of your court. 

I knew it in moments of pushing my body

so hard I could throw it aside: knew

when other girls threw me, knew in the honesty

miles forced upon me, the oneness I felt

with the play of a sword, and in dancing,

and dancing, and dancing, and dancing,

I knew it in the way I felt suits fit me,

knew it on my wedding day

when we both joked that I looked like a lesbian, 

knew it in the things we did for years before our marriage;

knew when my first girlfriend held my hands

in her much bigger hands;

knew on my back in a dozen beds where

other bodies helped mine understand.

What I know that I am remains constant

whatever the laws of this land

which beggars itself for the bucks of rich bigots,

where a judge, as a boon to his neighbour the litigant,

can make thousands of people no longer legitimate

with one lazy stroke of his doddering hand

- an absolute bargain for seventy grand,

but meaningless. I've always known what I am

and no bent court can change that. I'm not a KC,

I'm something more worthwhile, that I fought to be,

and I assure you that silk looks much better on me:

an all-natural trans woman, already free. 

A Post about Daredevil

 

If Matt Murdock is serious about getting New York back from the Kingpin, he is going to have to start acting a lot more like Frank Castle. 

Because you cannot run a successful insurgency and respect the rule of law. The goal of an insurgency is not to knock out perps and leave them tied-up for the cops with a cheeky note from your friendly neighbourhood vigilante. The goal of an insurgency is to kill the fucking cops. 

The goal of an insurgency is to bleed the enemy, to impose a cost on them in terms of loss of manpower, loss of resources, and loss of civilian morale which destroys their will to continue. If you want to conduct a successful insurgency, you have to start thinking like a terrorist, and using the tactics of the terrorist. 

Insurgency is not getting in the ring and duking it out mano e mano. It's sneaking up on the enemy and slitting their throats. It's seducing troops, getting them drunk, and taking them to the woods where your buddies can shoot them. It's poisoning food. It's sniping. It's planting IEDs. 

It is, in every way, about punishing the occupying force. Of course Frank would be better at it. Hell, we see that in the post-credits scene. 

This is, of course, just a post about a superhero show. 

Spy Wednesday (video)

 

Spy Wednesday

 

Spy Wednesday

This Spy Wednesday

Judas wears a three-piece suit

cut like post-Tin Machine Bowie

and curates her socials:

shares a poster for a gig,

a time-lapse of her signing,

some positive quotes;

but says nothing to antagonize 

The Guardian. After all, 

she has work to promote,

and it took so much

to get them on-side.

No sense in risking that now. 

There’s no profit

in broadcasting virtue.

In posting a pink and blue flag.

Solidarity lived in the old world.

They don’t give out prizes for that.

Play this right and she might win the Orwell:

Why risk that by rocking the boat?

So she chases two Nexium with Chivas Regal

and worries the knot at her throat.

Run Like A Rumour

 Been working on stuff in response to the disgraceful ruling yesterday by our illegitimate so-called Supreme Court. This sound piece, Run Like A Rumour, is my first. It's based on a text by John Berger and features music I cooked up while Endlesss was still a thing. 

Selections from the Zibaldone

 

My brother and his wife bought me a cute notebook for Christmas this year, and I've been using it as a kind of zibaldone since. So I've decided that, during weeks when I don't have the time or the energy (and this week, incapacitated as I am by what is either 'flu or covid, it's the latter) to do an original entry, it might be worth putting together a few quotations therefrom. So here are a few, in no particular order, interspersed with my sketches from the same notebook.

'Abuse is not sanctified by its duration or abundancy; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes.' - Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile 

'In bourgeois ideology, the idea of freedom is the freedom of all to be market actors. In bourgeois ideology, the idea of law is that it binds the propertied and the propertyless equally to their respective situations. These twin conceptions have been the basis of the reactionary idea of 'liberty', which has always been the keystone of formulated bourgeois ideology, from the 'liberty' of the Founding Fathers to own slaves to the 'liberty' of the current billionaire oligarchs to own the entire media ecosystem and to thus control the entire ideological discourse. It is this conception of 'liberty' that is being championed when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drivel on about absolute freedom of speech. They must have the freedom to speak over millions of others who have chosen not to be billionaires.' - Jack Graham, Bourgeois Salvations

'Bond famously has a licence to kill, which raises the question of who has the right to grant someone permission to murder. The answer, as Fleming and Bond saw it, was the British Crown. Bond's enemies also killed and destroyed, of course, but they did so without the correct paperwork and authority. This made them bad.' - John Higgs, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche

'Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.' - Thomas Ligotti, The Sect of the Idiot

'We always make such distinctions between those of us who are us and those of us who are tables and chairs and then some table turns up and thinks at you, criticizes you, talks to you, looks down on you. Likes you.' - Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

'The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?' - Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

'The cops don't get satisfied. They get placated.' - The Limey

'...I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.' - John Berger, Miners 

Albian Dreams: Journal Found in the American Wreckage

 The first time I realised that I was more intelligent than my father was when I looked into his eyes. 

This did not happen during his lifetime, of course. I was only two years old when my father took his own life, fearful to an equal degree of both the disease he believed he had contracted from his mentor, Mr Cohn - who would himself pass some weeks later - and the damage he believed the revelation of that disease would do to his reputation. If I looked into my father's eyes during one of those brief occasions when I saw him in those younger days, I have no memory of it - and at any rate, if I had been cognizant of any intellectual gap between us it would have been very much in the other direction. 

No, the moment when I looked into my father's eyes and realised, with certainty, that he was not my intellectual equal occurred only a few months ago. Two years ago, having broken ground on the TideFate California facility (following our proof-of-concept work at the Kirkoswald complex), knowing that the project on which I have laboured for so long was now nearing completion, and feeling that I could at last devote some of my time and talents to some less intensive project, I took up painting. My initial works in that field, completed as they were during a period when my mind had been preoccupied with some extremely complex concepts, were decidedly abstract, but once the initial fever had passed I began to explore the possibilities of figuration - and to work on improving my drawing from life, the better to do so. 

Even then, although I sketched many of my friends and acquaintances - my wife, my brother, my colleague E.M. - it was only three months or so ago that I set myself the task of creating a portrait of the man whose memory has guided every one of my life's actions - my late father. 

And so I busied myself scanning back through the library of footage of my father that I have acquired, trying to find a freeze-frame which truly captured his essence, his animating principle - his soul, if you want to use a mystical term. And it was in doing so that I realised that, whatever else I might discern behind his eyes - amusement, lust, a certain social cunning - the thing that stood out most was a sort of confused incomprehension. Again and again, when I paused the footage, I saw the eyes of a man trying, often in vain, to work out what was going on around him. A man whose mind, except on a few topics, most of them base - was mercilessly dull. 

I found it hard to capture it, this emptiness in that man's eyes. That vacancy. I have tried hard, over the years, to look for the intelligence in others. It has been necessary to do so. If I allow myself to become prey to my ego, I may start making mistakes, and, given my research, who knows what horrors might come from complacency? And it has been of practical use too. It allowed me to realise how E.M., once properly broken, might be put to practical use. Among many other things. And it allowed me to give TideFate a convincing cover. And so, when I draw people, I try to do so from a position of respect. And when I see the emptiness inside those eyes, my pencil tends to euphemise, to make the pupil just a little sharper, to tighten the slack in the jaw. But for all my generosity as an artist, I cannot deny it.

If I did not know this man to be my father, I would think him an idiot. 

 

This troubles me. It has always been one of my guiding assumptions, from the moment I began to plot the ways in which our world has diverged from those in which my father lived, that had he done so most of the work I have had to do would already have been accomplished. In that world, I have long felt certain, I would have been able to live the carefree life which my brother has allowed himself, instead of playing catch-up with the world I could have known. But what if I have been wrong? What if my father, in that other world, has truly been my brother's namesake, and squandered every opportunity afforded him? Will I cross realities, only to lock eyes with an uncomprehending oaf, a senile fool who nods emptily when I explain what my branch of our great family has achieved? 

I tell myself it does not matter. The California facility will be online in mere weeks. The stars move still, time runs, the hour must come and, one way or another, I will make that journey no other man has ever made before. I will look my long-dead father in his living eyes and bid him look upon my works. And together - in both our names, even if he is capable of little more than looking on and drooling - we will put right the wrongs of our two worlds. Alea iacta est. 

I am coming, father. You will see me soon.