Letter from the Editor

The American experiment appears to be ending in a not-so-stealthy authoritarian power grab. In fact, the current administration would like you to believe the struggle’s already over and the foxes have already secured the henhouse—as they ramp up libel laws and rule by executive fiat and deport legal asylum seekers to 21st century concentration camps in El Salvador—but these are not the most omnipotent of men, and our newscasters and historians are ringing the bell from their sound stages and social media accounts. The nation you grew up in is no more! The darkness has come and you need to wake up now if you ever want to wake up again. Look into the eyes of your children and align yourself with the light before the midnight of our homeland becomes so complete that you forget where your mouth is and your body becomes strange to you. Now is the time to panic!

But even as we watch the disenfranchised and lost being treated as dogs and less than dogs, as we witness media outlets and our most hallowed institutions of learning being coerced to bend the knee or suffer the consequences, even as the alleged leader of the free world spits bile in the face of the camera like a regular schoolyard punk, as students are disappeared and the threats have only just started threading their way into our mailboxes and through the tinkling glass of our shattered windows—still—as you turn walking wound and angels castrated of their wings—even then—there is nothing there. And there’s not even that.

Because this is how it’s always been. As you marched through the corridor of your life—its graduation ceremonies and heartbreak—from the infinite promise of adolescence and on into any given number of cardboard cut-out futures and their many alternate endings and bonus tracks—bankruptcies and biopsies—the webbing of your daydreams strung with meetings and the occasional colostomy bag—where are you in this equation? At what point are you? Because you are not the person in this corridor—this corridor that never was.

Letter from the Editor

The truth is, I always loved you.

Oh, you false messiah, what do you have to offer our perpetually flooded, brokedown and generally speaking nonexistent universe—what platitudes and what shopping tips—and what will come of it when it comes—the suburbs turned into a no-man’s land between the scavenging riches of the liquefied and decomposing downtown and what wilds have grown beyond—the family dog murdered for its meat—an eye for an eye—and nothing but silence in between—all wrong place wrong time on account of some of us weren’t built to survive the apocalypse, but you think you’ll do just fine, don’t you?

You and me are you, my false messiah—who sit here pontificating in our cynicism, because—with the apocalypse just around the corner, all your favorite romantic comedies don’t do it for you anymore.

So—who are we? We’re the ones with our feet in two epochs, and our greatest hope is to get to the credits of this madcap comedy of a genocidal romp without being swept up in its killing fields. Many of us believe even now that the annihilation of everything and everyone will only happen on the far side of the globe from us, in the global south of our former vacation spots, but no one panics like a suburbanite, not to mention a mob of panicked suburbanites, armed with rifles and tiki torches.

Letter from the Editor

The apocalypse just got a whole hell of a lot more personal. It’s turned its face inside out and made itself into just one of the boys. It’s twisted your arm back and then back again—and back again—until the logjam of muscle memory is gone and you are nothing but %100 rubber, with a corkscrew of an appendage that twirls off comedically into the never-ending night. Welcome to Neverland.

The ups are very much going up and the downs are just around the corner, and they say that civil war is just around the corner, and Americans have always been good at cutting corners.

Neverland is a state of both never-becoming and never-having-been. It is the place where the future we dream of is a dream and the past we remember never was. It is a place where most of us live most of the time. And it itches.

Letter from the Editor

Chandler Bing has been on my mind a lot recently.

Or—to be more precise—Matthew Perry and the sitcom universe which he navigated, and what happens when that sitcom universe has its sitcom apocalypse. Like a stand-up comedian confessing to being a serial killer, or someone having a heart attack on SNL. Our illusions unravel.

Of course, our illusions are unraveling because a legitimate apocalypse is underfoot, and illusions cannot stand the unsettling of our world.

But also. Furthermore. To be clear, when I speak of apocalypse, I am speaking of an ending of things as they are. How the Mayans described the apocalypse or a Navajo understanding of the end of history. History never ends. It only has its psychotic break and then begins again somewhere earlier in the story. Maybe it’s agrarianism, or hunter gatherer with a smattering of bizarre tools that no one remembers how to make go anymore. It could also fragment, such that there are the Star Trekians living in orbit, when it’s all Dark Ages down below.

Who knows?

And it is specifically because we are facing this terrifying unknown that our world has lost its ability to dream anything but the most derivative of dreams. (We are the proverbial deer in the headlights and we have just proverbially shat ourselves.) And this inability to dream new dreams is fueling the unwinding of things in an endless cycle of imagination abuse. As in… Our panic makes us unable to imagine any solution, and our inability to imagine any solution fuels our panic. That sort of thing. And somewhere in there, we start intentionally using our imaginations in ways they weren’t meant to because we’ve forgotten what they’re there for.

Spoiler alert. Imaginations are a tool to help guide you through the universe. Not a blow-up doll to replace actual human contact.

(You may argue that an imagination can be used however the imaginer likes, including like a blow-up doll human replacement, but I think you’ll find it’s like trying to make love to a blow-up doll amoeba. It keeps frustrating your intent.)

So. We have all retreated into our sound stages and are televising our reactionary beliefs to a readymade audience of our peers. Our media universe has compartmentalized. Mitosis has begun.

Letter from the Editor

The first time I met a man I will call M, I was traveling across the country in a 1971 VW minibus with a girl who broke up with me after a week, and performing plays in people’s in people’s bedrooms, and he was going to cooking school. Sometimes it takes a really destructive love affair to realize this’s no way to spend your life. Writing code for hours and hours and hours and then? What do I get at the end of the day? A headache. We then proceeded to perform an anarchist musical in his living room.

That was years ago now, and he has since gone on to become a food hacker, his own term.

Letter from the Editor

Fruit seeds sat in the fruit are like as pieces of wood set in the middle of a sweet veil of meat. When some sliver of wood comes free from the seed to sit in a jiggling yellow mango slice, for example, it Is like a solitary tooth sat in some otherwise free-floating gums. It is like witnessing a breach in the universe.

I moved to LA—which is also like a breach in the universe—or more as like a rift between the larger storytelling worlds of Hollywood and the everyday mundane walking around world of Target and Marshall’s. This is before any end of the world began, and back when Bladerunner had a quaint other-worldly quality to it, back when we were all content to live through scenes that have only been touched by the barest inkling of realism. There are still the same homes in the hillocks that are like slices of marble arranged decoratively upon the horizon, and it still seems people here can glide on through to the other side powered only by the brilliance of their bling, but—as we do indeed slide into the unacceptable end times, making the occasional detour through places of no clear definition—as our mouths veer out of themselves in our horror and our eyes become shrink-wrapped in tears—what apocalypse is being written? Here in this shifting miasma in the desert? Are the fires rising? Are the water lapping at our shoes? Do the bureaucrats hint at darker goings on in the pantries just outside the halls of justice? Are the piles of the dead truly alarming?

Letter from the Editor

We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.

And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.

Letter from the Editor

In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.

Letter from the Editor

Those of us who are ourselves involved in manufacturing the sorts of weirdness showcased in the award-winning film Frank are prone to be a little over-sensitive that others are chuckling darkly in corners at our futile efforts. We are the sensitive children others beat with mounds of dung. We are the ones who wore the dung-shirts for the sake of something greater than just coins of refined dung, but rather for the sake of the greater dung god in the sky sort of thing. Even while screaming silly that this omniscient dung being could never exist. What is Frank?

Letter from the Editor

[Our sci fi films are like ads for future Apple products and propaganda for a reductionist view of the present, in which our end is inevitable, and the toys of the rich will become prettier and prettier while the rest of us drown in our own filth. In this letter from the editor I wanted to write about this sci fi present of ours. About the figures who fill it and what functions they serve, the places we’re going and the places that are taking us there, and most importantly about the one thing that is driving it all.]

I. Persons

There are certain persons who contain our fantasy—who, it seems, exist only to act as avatars for those who believe in them and the ideas they represent. Most obvious of course would be your standard everyday politician. In becoming public figures, they also become icons that can then spread in a meme-like way. Or Jesus. But Walt Disney also comes to mind.

Letter from the Editor

It’s Saturday night and I’m drinking alone while contemplating drones and metadata; complacent celebrity culture staring its own collapse in the face with remarkable calm and indifference and the various potential proofs for a multiverse I’ve been reading up on lately; wars over natural resources and increasingly more extreme weather all the time and the civil unrest that goes along with it and the NSA just trying to plan ahead with its massive domestic surveillance program we’ve all been hearing about recently thanks to Mr. Edward Snowden. And in the back of my mind, there’s always Philip K Dick, like a critic in the corner. Specifically, how PKD is the New World Order?

Letter from the Editor

The Hungry Brain is supposedly the best bar in America and it is getting further and further away with every step I take. Later, my brother will tell his friends how he had been psychically dragging me the whole way, whatever that means. Then we’ve been walking for I don’t know how long and we’re standing in another bar called the Burlington. It’s got just enough lighting to allow a person to maneuver from one end of the bar to the other without hurting themselves, but not enough lighting for anyone’s acne to be noticeable, and Jules and I are discussing walking BACK to the Hungry Brain, and the show is about to begin. Which, in the end, we just slipped in the back and I ordered a beer in a stupid little plastic cup, and there was this awkward-seeming guy with an acoustic guitar on stage. I thought, “Oh God.” The man with the acoustic guitar began to play.

Letter from the Editor

In his groundbreaking book, Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin distinguishes between 19th Century French attitudes towards their writers and the attitudes of their 19th Century Russian counterparts. The French, he claims, considered the life of the writer to be extraneous, that the style and the skill of the author was paramount, while for Russians an author and his life were indistinguishable. I have always sided with the Russians in this regard.

The writer is not just a detached craftsman or stylist, but a person writing about people. Do I believe in this person or not? In the world as this person depicts it? Is this author a false prophet or a true prophet? This is how I think of writing. How very Old Testament of me. Which brings us to the New Sincerity.

Letter from the Editor

A friend of mine once said that Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt fame did for drums what Jimi Hendrix did for guitar. And there have been conversations I have overheard in garden parties where people spoke of Lightning Bolt in general as if they were talking of the risen Christ. A Noise duo, bass and drums, with the driving force of a Led Zeppelin but with a minimalist Philip Glass bent and the psychedelic experimentalism of a Sun Ra. I remember a night long ago and myself in a throng of adoring fans pressing against the invisible bubble surrounding Lightning Bolt as they performed in the direct center of the warehouse floor.

But Chippendale is not just a risen brother of Jimi Hendrix on his kit of clouds. He is also a comix illustrator and one of the founding members of Fort Thunder—a warehouse space in the Olneyville district of Providence—a place he moved into with his friend Mat Brinkman in the mid-nineties. The space eventually came to house a number of local avant-garde artists and musicians, was the home to Paper Rodeo, Paper Radio, and of course, Lightning Bolt, until it was shut down in 2001.

Letter from the Editor

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits… In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits,” Lilly, J. C. (1974). The Human Biocomputer. London: Abacus.

For this second Letter from the Editor, I wanted to speak about one of my favorite philosophers of the 20th Century, John C. Lilly.