cody frank

I have an aversion to realism for esoteric (to me) reasons that I find justification for in an essay, Lemurian Time War, from the CCRU about William S. Burroughs:

Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion….Even representative realism participates—albeit unknowingly—in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality

I say this is a post-hoc justification because I don’t know exactly why I feel averse to writing realism. a story draft I just finished is more or less realistic; it takes as stylistic departure a certain kind of corporate HR language that lends the story a slight strangeness, but what “happens” in the story is normal everyday life stuff. for whatever reason, when I think of the kind of fiction I’d like to write, I imagine surrealism or magical realism, cartoonish burlesque, dream-logic narratives that defy clean categorization and play with the expected relationship of literature to whatever “reality” is. I like the story I wrote, but it also seems “small,” both for being more-or-less realistic, and for not being all that engaged politically or socially. (plus it’s short, only ~1700 words on first draft.)

relatedly, there’s probably some unresolved tension in my psyche that manifests in seeing my own life as “boring,” and that therefor the “things that happen to me” aren’t worth writing about. the one story I wrote isn’t about something that happened to me, though I can see where personal experience has been transformed into the emotional background of the story. the other story I’m working on is more closely informed by actual events of my life, but not related in the way I would tell the story to someone interested in the actual events of my life; things are exaggerated, characters are rendered unkindly, things are rearranged for effect. strangely, though, this story lends itself more to a surreal, unstable mode. so I guess what this post is about is, what exactly is art’s relation to reality, and what exactly makes something “realistic.”

the reason this question comes up for me is that the two artists—David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon—that I most admire and who I spend the most time thinking about do not tell stories that are “realistic.” and a lot of the time I spend thinking about their stories involves me wondering how exactly I can tap into the kind of dream logic they operate on. this line of thinking feeds on a kind of schoolmarmish, backwards undergraduate way of thinking about art, which conceives of artists as puzzle makers, cryptographers with secret correspondence keys for what their images, symbols, motifs “translate” into in “normal” terms. which is to say, it’s a conception of art as a purely intellectual exercise. Lynch himself says that the way he works is by intuition and revision, developing ideas, reworking, taking things out, putting new things back in, so that the symbols in his work are living, dynamic glyphs, not pure allegories.

there are two tangential concerns in this post, I think: one, that I need to allow myself to work at whatever I find engaging to work at, free of any preconceived notion of what’s “supposed to” be made. this might mean dropping the demand that I make something “weird” or “surreal” or “dreamy” in favor of making something at all, even if it’s closer to “realism” than I sometimes think I should be. and two, that to work in a dream mode, I have to be comfortable with not understanding exactly what the thing I make means, or at least not having a readymade account, were someone to ask for one. (worth noting that neither Lynch nor Pynchon [Lynchon, lol] ever deign to give an account of their work, despite there clearly being something the work means to them, personally)

and I guess, a third thing: that reality is stranger than anyone who demands realism from their art would ever admit. writing always requires contact with “real life”—even in the most effective but deranged stories, something resonates with our understanding of the world—but “real life” sometimes is surreal, or like a film noir, or a ghost story.

this all speaks to what I always want from art: making art ought to feel like getting away with something I shouldn’t be allowed to do. this is how I take Adorno’s declaration that “every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” art is an act of transgression, borne out of sublimated anger at a perceived lack of freedom (at least, it is for me).

which isn’t to say that the content of art has to be transgressive. but I have long been drawn to art that is transgressive. lately I’ve been watching more movies, but, not wanting to be someone who just watches what’s offered by a single corporation, I’ve been seeking out movies that aren’t offered by the good people at Criterion. if you’re someone who loves movies but doesn’t love mainstream movies, if you venture away from the hallowed halls of what Criterion collects, you’re bound to stumble upon a subset of movies that are broadly seen as “trashy,” “bad taste,” “lurid,” etc. I haven’t myself yet watched many of these genre movies, but as I’ve oriented myself in this section of the virtual video shop, there’s a thrill in realizing I can tell any kind of story I want. for whatever reason, it’s been immensely helpful to me to start thinking about the stories I want to tell as genre movies: crime thriller! erotic horror! paranormal noir! some of them I could actually even do treatments of as screenplays, but even if I don’t plan to make movie (I do), thinking of a story as a movie, to my broken 21st century brain, is way more exciting than thinking of stories in the Gordon Lish/Iowa Workshop way of words after words, plot’s not important, blah blah blah. using genre conventions is a way of swinging a crowbar against the confines of the Reality Control System.

even this post, I’m not sure I’m getting across what I mean, and I’m kinda just letting the ideas spill out without really knowing where it’s going, trusting it means something to me and sure I’ll draw connections as they come to mind but fuck you.

palm trees shade
valentine etched in concrete

flowers pressed 
—some other 
time, boot heel
crunches glass cracklings
a curbside shindig
no one was invited to

it's too much to wonder
what could be
what is
is this

the hills of Sanfrancisco
separate aeons
of possibility,
futures cancelled
to save the worst of all
it won't end 

the coda to The Phantom Empire, by Geoffrey O’Brien, touches upon a question I ponder from time to time: will we always have movies? won’t, at some point in the collapsing future, the tools necessary to make films become harder and harder to come by? most significantly, contemporary film stock is made from petroleum byproducts—and the components in digital cameras are extracted in processes that are also detrimental to the environment. the mechanism for distribution, the zigzagging of flights between locations, studios, and premieres, the state subsidies that launder the blood money of the American Experiment. “And will this empire indeed go on forever? Won’t the electricity run out, won’t the raw materials have to be rationed, won’t such practices fall victim to the impending war against pollutants?….[Maybe people in the future] would simply lose interest. Having evolved out of a world where the little living pictures were everywhere, perhaps the most exciting thing they could witness would be the screen going blank.”

movies, more than any other medium, inspire the deepest ambivalence in me. people can decry novels as “bourgeois,” reflections of a particular formation of subjectivity, relics of an era and a class with the leisure time required to read hundreds of pages. I’m not convinced by this, but it gives pause, and novels certainly can be used as a method of withdrawal from the world. nonetheless, stories, even those written on paper and bound in books, will not likely disappear, and they have been and will remain objects that beckon to the highest aspects of the human spirit.

painting has certainly become a little more than a barnacle on the flank of financialized capital. since at least the 1950s, what appears on a canvas is less important than how much money can exchange hands behind it. the most “valuable” paintings more often than not sit in Swiss warehouses or on Caribbean islands, hidden from the prying hands of national governments seeking to remove wealth from circulation, not to mention any eyes that might see something beautiful. but then we are confronted with those images on the cave walls of southern France, and we’re reminded just how mysterious this impulse is, to represent, in whatever material’s to hand, the forms that constitute the world.

movies, though. movies swallowed reality. movies promise a shared community experience, but only by turning each audience member into an interchangeable cipher. the movies colonize our memories, our dreamspaces; not just with their plots, but with the private lives of their actors, the business intrigue between their production companies. the movies are everywhere, too: television shows, advertisements, music videos, TikTok dances, YouTube essays, surveillance footage. and the movies operate by flagrantly manipulating perception: whether or not you recognize it as technique, or an illusion, the fact is that with movies we’ve managed the most effective means of mind control ever dreamt of. the Roman empire would kill to have movies, and perhaps that’s exactly what happened; Leni Riefenstahl, Ronald Reagan, Top Gun: Maverick.

but a world without movies? without the beauty, splendor, horror, or longing we’ve experienced through the screen? without these glimpses into a reality we inhabit but can’t quite realize? it pains me to imagine a world without movies. but perhaps that’s what exactly what the movies want us to feel.

watched “Crazeologie” last night, which is a student film directed by Louis Malle, who most people know as the director of My Dinner With Andre. on a technical level the short was competent, demonstrating a natural feel for how to work the camera, how to pace dialogue and block actors. as an attempt at making Cinema of the Absurd, hey, Malle tried at least, but not everyone can be Samuel Beckett.

i’m discouragemaxxing. hackcore. totally impostorsyndromepilled. it’s giving failed novelist. big poseur vibes. this blog is boring-coded. in short, he’s NGMI.

up till today, I’ve been pretty good about working here and there on this and that. today I haven’t written anything and don’t feel much like writing anything. the things I’m reading all make me feel less-than-confident in my own ability to write eloquently or poetically. it’s part of the problem with writing, I guess, feeling like what you yourself write reads as too obvious or trite, because of course if you’re writing your own thoughts which are always buzzing in your own voice in your own head, then it’ll sound uninspired to you. (really need to stop publicizing my doubts; I’m fucking talented, & no one has my perspective, & all my opps [who live in my head] are bitchass chumps).

feeling like I shouldn’t only be writing “watched this, read this, listened to this,” or if I’m going to do that, do other kinds of writing (my coworker once complimented the writing I do here but also said he would like to see more “day-to-day” kind of writing, something I very much struggle with, and justify away via projected disdain for autobiographical writing, though that all probably suggests it’s what I need to lean into the most, the area of writing I find most daunting; on this note, I rather enjoyed my friend’s latest newsletter which he characterized as too “dear diary”) or else do more rigorous critical writing. to resurrect my dormant newsletter, I’m planning a big multi-part project that’s probably actually a bad idea because it will have me thinking too much about someone else’s art rather than making my own, but it’ll be a good excuse to do a bunch of research I’ve been meaning to do anyway.

reading The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, by Geoffrey O’Brien. some of the most poetic, elliptical and evocative critical writing I’ve ever read. this is one of the things that’s making me feel like my own writing is flat & boring. support-anons will say “it’s a published book, it’s not a first draft, O’Brien didn’t land on those images or ideas without working them over.” shut up.

finished The Culture of Narcissism. ironically, given Lasch’s contempt for the “therapeutic” turn in our priorities as a result of the conditions of commodity capitalism, reading this book was actually pretty therapeutic for me. it helped me see certain habits of mine in a different light, namely that it’s a result of an underdeveloped ego that leads me to overvalue the esteem of others to the point of always tailoring my behavior to best present as whatever it is someone else needs of me. this is a pervasive problem among people nowadays—always behaving in such a way as to curry favor with a (largely imagined) audience. one of the most interesting aspects of Lasch’s analysis is in locating the neuroses of contemporary culture in a malignant superego. for me, personally, this manifests as a preoccupation with doing things the “correct” way—a view that is inimical to the creative process.

for all the book’s strengths, however, The Culture of Narcissism spends an inordinate amount of energy on lamenting the loss of certain values that seem, to my view, typical of more oppressive social arrangements: Lasch takes it on faith that the “family” is a unmitigated social good; that former gender customs a la chivalry, even with their shortcomings, helped restrain the worst excesses of patriarchy. his impulse towards rigorous historicizing is unevenly applied, in my opinion. the thrust of his argument is worth grappling with, but too many of his talking points, even if they are presented with more nuance, only echo typical conservative anxieties about the decadence of modern society.

if I were interested in being that kind of writer, I’d try to meld some of his arguments with a media ecology style exploration of internet pornography, but instead that’ll probably end up in some fictional creation instead.

picked Satantango back up again. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling with it so much as it’s something that forces you to let happen to you, and keeping track of the intercharacter dynamics takes a backseat to keeping your head afloat amidst the deluge of text. it’s a work that I’m sure would reward deep familiarity, and a first read does not provide anyone with deep familiarity. but the atmosphere of screaming desolation, and the grim absurdity that’s pressed out of the desperation these people seem so crushed by, is intoxicating. glad I picked it back up.

watched The Seventh Seal, always a delight. I should write something about Bergman’s belief that cinema has nothing to do with literature, because it’s an interesting question, especially for me, a writer who is always tempted to follow the siren call of filmmaking.

a new JPEGMAFIA album is out, which means that I want to make beats again. it’s honestly fucked up how great Peggy is at producing; it’s too bad his rapping can’t keep pace. ah well, we can’t all be renaissance men.

an artist must follow the call of their feeling, deeply and truly felt, wherever it may go. this, more often than not, will lead to dark crevices we dump gallons of psychic energy pretending into filling up and aren’t there, even though what lurks within them holds far greater sway on the course of one’s life than we like to admit. call it “shadow work” if you must, but in art we tend to call this “honesty,” or even “bravery.”

Israel (presumably) launched a missile on Tehran, killing Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh. the brazenness of this attack, on the man most actively working towards an end to the hostilities against Gaza, is shocking, even by Israeli standards. Israel is in deep crisis, and has been since before the events of October 7, 2023. expect the political leaders and the military to grow increasingly erratic in the coming months, especially as schisms form between the police and the IDF. & whether or not Iran chooses to retaliate is only a matter of timing; at some point Israel’s actions will draw the region into a wider conflict, one that will likely prompt decisive action by Iran, and perhaps even China or Russia, which will embarrass the United States, who has admitted they will not provide the kind of support Israel will need to survive such a conflict.

meanwhile, the US’s steadfast devotion to supporting the Israelis no matter how appallingly they behave suggests that what’s currently happening in the Middle East is a proxy struggle over the all-but-guaranteed unification of Europe and Asia by supply and transportation routes that will leave the United States out in the cold in the back half of the 21st century. my bet is that once the chips are down, the US will switch focus back to the other front in this proxy struggle, Ukraine.

however, most concerning is the prospect that the US is so eager to back the Israelis in their psychotic, genocidal, fascist suppression of the people of Gaza because, to deal with the cascading crises that US supremacy has wrought upon the world—destruction of the global south leading to mass migrations, along with a hollowing out of America’s own internal hinterlands, all exacerbated by worsening environmental catastrophes—the US wants to normalize the most egregious of Israel’s suppressive efforts. that way, vast surveillance networks, open violence against the poor, assassination of anyone inconvenient, destruction of infrastructure, all appear as business as usual, the cost of living in the Greatest Country in the World. the realization of the virtual Fourth Reich that Western Elites have been building since the fall of the Third. if you have a hard time imagining that, consider that once upon at time police officers didn’t wear bullet proof vests and carry M4s like an army occupying Fallujah. the imperial frontier always comes home, as they say.

anyway, I wanted to write about short story craft stuff today, and I didn’t really do what the Knight of Cups called me to do here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that The Empire Never Ended (And It Won’t Any Time Soon).

in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s telling, Pages sit between the 2 and 3 positions, 2 being the number of untapped potential and 3 the number of activity unfolding. 2+3=5, and yesterday I pulled the 5 of Pentacles; 5, according to Jodorowsky, is the hinge point between 1-4 (materiality) and 6-9 (spirituality). needless to say, there’s a threshold I’m at, and it involves transforming, alchemically, base material (pentacles), which I’ve been thinking of as “narcissism,” into spiritual gold—schizomystical proclamations. I came up with this schema for interpreting the card before I had The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch, come in for me at the library this morning. in it, Lasch discusses how in the 60s, new literary forms developed, what we might call “New Journalism” or “the confessional mode,” that flaunted the writer’s own particular perspective as a means for interrogating how culture, economics, and politics worked upon the writer to shape that perspective; that is, it refined the base material of the writer’s personal life into gold that shines upon the society from which it arises.

in Lasch’s account, this is a worthy innovation of the period, but, of course, this privileging of the personal as way into the political risks falling into mere self-aggrandizement:

Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicates that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensable for art. Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the lives of famous people. In Mailer’s works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer’s own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity.

too bad Lasch isn’t around to comment on Knausgaard. another fun part of the little bit that I’ve read so far is the page he devotes to dunking on Jerry Rubin, clown prince of the yippies-turned-yuppies.

in other reading news, I’m struggling with what else I’m in the midst of. Satantango by Krasznahorkai is phenomenal so far, but with 30-page chapters consisting of a single paragraph requiring intense unbroken focus, it’s been hard to “chip away at it”, while I’m trying to devote more time to this blog, planning two novels, and writing stories. if I don’t pick it back up in a few days I’ll probably set it aside til I can give it more of my attention in a few weeks. on the subject of planning a novel, I’m also annotating Shamanism by Mircea Eliade, having lots of fun with it, but it’s a little repetitive and describes in rotation the practices of various northern and central Asian cultures. it’s quite interesting, but a little too in the weeds for my purposes. and I’ve been sipping from Minima Moralia by Adorno and totally honest, it’s great in flashes, but nearly opaque in others, to the point where I know I’m going to have to reread it once I’m done and therefor I’m tempted to put it aside half-read as well. here’s a famous tidbit from what I’ve read so far:

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

the ways by which I sustain a comfortable life—steady employment, safe routine, the support of those better off than me—may be what’s keeping me out in the cold, so to speak, of the life I really want to live, namely, a life devoted to art. anyone who’s kept up with me for a while will known I often fantasize about a bohemian existence, life on the margins, scorning anything that prevents me from thinking about the world honestly and documenting my experience in it. but the truth is that my actions, despite what I think of myself, indicate that I’m only too eager to sacrifice for the sake of a life of ease and stability.

the 5 of Pentacles this morning suggests that, even though I’m warm and cozy in my little house by the beach, spiritually I’ve kept myself away from the work I ostensibly wish to do. it is distraction and laziness, not comfort, that hold me back; yes, perhaps dedication and new priorities will lead to loss of comforts, but to blame the comforts is entirely backwards.

the wall keeping the vagrants out in the cold on the card is of my own making: it is time I let the seekers in.

O Egypt, Egypt, of your reverent deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children! Only words cut in stone will survive to tell your faithful works, and the Scythian or Indian or some such neighbor barbarian will dwell in Egypt. For divinity goes back to heaven, and all the people will die, deserted, as Egypt will be widowed and deserted by god and human. I call to you, most holy river, and I tell your future: a torrent of blood will fill you to the banks, and you will burst over them; not only will blood pollute your diving waters, it will also make them break out everywhere, and the number of the entombed will be much larger than the living. Whoever survives will be recognized as Egyptian only by his language; in his actions he will seem a foreigner.

Asclepius, why do you weep? Egypt herself will be persuaded to deeds much wickeder than these, and she will be steeped in evils far worse. A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter unbelief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or to worship. This all—a good thing that never had nor has nor will have its better—will be endangered. People will find it oppressive and scorn it. They will not cherish this entire world, a work of god beyond compare, a glorious construction, a bounty composed of images in multiform variety, a mechanism for god’s will ungrudgingly supporting his work, making a unity of everything that can be honored, praised, and finally loved by those who see it, a multiform accumulation taken as a single thing.

They will prefer shadows to light, and they will find death more expedient than life. No one will look up to heaven. The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise; the lunatic will be thought brave, and the scoundrel will be taken for a decent person. Soul and all teachings about soul (that soul began as immortal or else expects to attain immortality) as I revealed them to you will be considered not simply laughable but even illusory. But—believe me—whoever dedicates himself to reverence of mind will find himself facing a capital penalty. They will establish new laws, new justice. Nothing holy, nothing reverent nor worthy of heaven or heavenly beings will be heard of or believed in the mind.

How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! Only the baleful angels remain to mingle with humans, seizing the wretches and driving them to every outrageous crime—war, looting, trickery and all that is contrary to the nature of souls. Then neither will the earth stand firm nor the sea be sailable; the stars will not cross heaven nor will the course of the stars stand firm in heaven. Every divine voice will grow mute in enforced silence. The fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will no more be fertile; and the very air will droop in gloomy lethargy.

Such will be the old age of the world: irreverence, disorder, disregard for everything good. When all this comes to pass, Asclepius, then the master and father, the god whose power is primary, governor of the first god, will look on this conduct and these willful crimes, and in an act of will—which is god’s benevolence—he will take his stand against the vices and the perversion of everything, righting wrongs, washing away malice in a flood or consuming it in fire or ending it by spreading pestilential disease everywhere. Then he will restore the world to its beauty of old so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder, and with constant benedictions and proclamations of praise the people of that time will honor the god who makes and restores so great a work. And this will be the geniture of the world: a reformation of all good things and a restitution, most holy and most reverent, of nature itself, reordered in the course of time, which is and was everlasting and without beginning. For god’s will has no beginning; it remains the same, everlasting in its present state. God’s nature is deliberation; will is the supreme goodness.

“Asclepius,” Corpus Hermeticum [emphasis blogger’s]

sadness accompanies any realization that the ideas you once held were in fact snags along the trail. of course it’s easy to lament how things might have gone had you come to see the errors of your thinking sooner. go ahead, feel the regret. that’s the sense of allowing distinctions that no longer work dissolve. but do not fall into a crisis merely because your thinking was mistaken. is it not a great blessing to come to see the true way forward? one not free of snags but that you can better feel yourself aligned with, so that navigating starts to be a matter of allowing the path run through you, not you over the path.

that’s not to say that the path will be clear. confusion still reigns. you may awaken in the night, lost and distraught. just remember that you are the source of your own misery.

(hopefully I’m coming to settle into some more sustainable working habits. something’s happened, and I’m shedding lots of hang ups that prevented me from writing with any enjoyment. it was always a slog, because I was comparing myself to my models, or because I thought things had to be done a certain way, or because I expected a first draft to come out impeccably. but now, I’m allowing myself to work slower, with less rigid expectations, treating novel writing as I would filmmaking, from notes/drafts/outline all the way through post-production. as a result, I’m totally adrift as far as knowing how it’s all going, other than knowing I’m for once actually eager to work, rather than filled with dread.)

it’s the third day in a row I’ve pulled the Three of Swords in some manner or other; in a full Celtic cross on Wednesday, it occupied the future position, reversed, and again it came up reversed yesterday. here it is unreversed. something needs me to pay attention to this.

Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind. Divinatory Meanings: Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration. Reversed: Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, A.E. Waite

The vital aspect of the Threes achieves transformation by the birth of the new….A popular expression describing a state of mental confusion is “losing one’s bearings.” This card, like all the Threes, has an adolescent tone. Here, every problem that can arise comes up; there is confusion between believing and knowing, and we think without being united to the world, motivated by the energy of an ideal that could just as easily be fallacious as true. The energy of the Three of Swords is closely connected to the sexual energy of the Wands….

This Arcanum refers to the fanatic bursting forth of primary ideas and first opinions. It is a sign of intellectual enthusiasm that can easily combine with a passion for studying and reading. The still-immature intellect acts purely spontaneously and discerns no difference between believing and knowing. We also can see a desire for intellectual development in this card—for example, a student’s desire to pass an exam. The negative connotations fall under the heading of all kinds of fanaticism, obstinacy, refusal to push deeper, and dispersal. The Three can also point to a lack of follow-through on ideas.

The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky

Swordplay in the hands of a master has been compared to…the sharpening of the ‘psychic power of seeing in order to act immediately in accordance with what it sees”….[The] sword’s essence is to carve, thrust, divide, whether as a deathblow that slays an opponent, a decisive separation from worldly attachment or the separating out of consciousness from psyche’s deep, unconscious recesses….Beyond technical brilliance, the best swordsman is the one who attains the capacity to engage the subtleties of the animating spirit of the sword, so that subject and object, mind and body are one, single-minded, resolute.

The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images

[The sword’s] primary symbolic meaning…is of a wound and the power to wound, and hence of liberty and strength….There can be no doubt that there is a sociological factor in sword-symbolism, since the sword is an instrument proper to the knight, who is the defender of the forces of light against the forces of darkness. But the fact is that in rites at the dawning of history and in folklore even today, the sword plays a similar spiritual rôle, with the magic power to fight off the dark powers personified in the “malevolent dead”….The sword, because of its implication of “physical extermination,” must be a symbol of spiritual evolution….

A Dictionary of Symbols, Juan Eduardo Cirlot

recent things:

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann: gotta give the Aussie auteur credit, very few major filmmakers have it in them to bring this much excess to the screen. unfortunately this take on R+J is a mess. the modern acting he has the actors doing makes it nearly impossible at times to hear the Bard’s poetry. I forgot Jamie Kennedy is in this. don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun flick, and there’s lot’s of great scenes—the famous first meeting between Romeo and Juliet, from opposite sides of the fish tank, deserves its iconic status, and Peter Postlethwaite brings enough conviction to his portrayal of Friar Laurence to overshadow some of the sillier choices made by Luhrmann.

also, hold on, just some quick math here…yep, I won’t be saying what I thought about Claire Danes in this movie.

miscellany:

Carbyne is an Israeli surveillance company that sells software granting access to 911 callers’ GPS, camera, and other identifying data to emergency dispatch services. on Carbyne’s advisory board is Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security and co-author of the Patriot Act. Carbyne has received investments from figures no less luminary than former Israeli Prime Minsiter Ehud Barak, who got the funds from one Jeffrey Epstein. also among Carbyne’s investors is Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame, as well as the godfather of the PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has been linked to those semi-public intellectuals who provide the philosophical framework of what’s known as the Dark Enlightenment, most notably Nick Land. In Nick Land’s view, capitalism is a program sent back from the future by a transhistorical artificial intelligence directing events such that its eventual takeover of the planet is guaranteed, ushering in a post-human epoch. In this view, those like Prince, Thiel, and Barak/Epstein are merely agents who throw their lot in with the fait accompli of technosoteriology for a chance at merging with the apocalyptic esoteric forces struggling to immanentize themselves. and anyone who doesn’t get with the program will be punished for their impudence. (source)