Been branching out during my recent infirmity; experimenting with new forms.
Author: julesb
a change of scenery
do you like rock climbing? i love it. it's exceptionally easy for me since i am actually only eyes and hands and nothing else. i'm like some spooky VR visitor– a floating perception point isometrically flanked by clumsy reality-manipulators. that's all! it would be rude to contradict me; only a churl would point out the sagging mass of of meat and pain– undifferentiated, amoebic meat and pain– that dangles unflatteringly below and between.
anyhow my latest achievement as a climber is summiting (as we in the ascensionist lifestyle call it) a bottomless pit of paralyzing despair. now i am basking, positively marinating, wallowing like a pig in shit in the refreshingly distinct paralyzing self-disgust that saturates the immediate epiabyssal environment.
what a refreshing vacation from paralytic despair– to taste again the mighty and tireless honed pendulum that reigns here above. its every swipe nonfatally bisects me; my capacity for this repetitive savagery is positively promethean! yes, now that i can think a little, and see a little, i can at last think and see what a worthless piece of shit i am. the howling fourth-dimensional winds of the inner void have quieted for the mo', and i am permitted to contemplate the blasted moonscape they've carved out of that material from which is more typically formed, in the cases of less excitingly broken people, a life.
dragging myself painstakingly out of the hell western medicine might deem "depression" is itself quite hellish i find… because down in the pit, where (when) it's bad enough that i am unable to do anything, including think or understand, i am at least semi-unaware of myself. now alas, like a drunkard after a binge, i must confront the wreckage i have wrought in my self-indulgent rampage… i am exiled from the eden of paralytic despair.
back when i had the attention span for it, i used to watch anime. yes, debased and pathetic a pasttime as it is, anime falls into the category of things i used to enjoy but have lost capacity for. among the things i enjoyed about anime was the nanobot-like way in which it could apparently consume anything: any story, any legend, any cosmology, ideology, or historical event, any religion, any activity, and make anime out of it. anime is like some primitive engine that can run on gasoline, or alcohol, or fryer grease, interchangeably… it's omnivorous. the entire world is grist for its mill, and whatever it consumes simply becomes anime.
similarly to how anime as a medium absorbs everything, i find that psychologically, any perception or truth or experience only feeds my despair and revulsion.
trying to bootstrap myself out of hell reminds me of going through a twisted version of the lacanian theory of infant psychological development, with this ascent into self-hatred being the "mirror phase" — which i understand to be, in lacanian theory, the point at which the infant begins to conceive of itself as a discrete entity, a being among beings.
disclaimer: i don't pretend to understand lacan or rly care about his ideas or their significance. they're just fragments for me to toy with and recombine.
something lacan did seem to get more right than some others is his rejection of linear time, in the sense that he posits "retroaction," meaning a sort of hindsighted comprehension: an overlaying of contemporary understanding onto past events.
in my own depressive re-infancy, at the point at which i am finally capable of, say, shaving or making food, i am treated then to the merciless clarity that i have just spent X days lying in bed doing nothing, for no good reason other than that i'm fucking stupid.
this epistemological apperception (if you will) is the pendulum sweeping ceaselessly over the pit.
recovered work from UNCONTROLLABLE
an old friend shared with me copies of UNCONTROLLABLE, another post-k new orleans anarchist periodical to which i contributed. it was one i'd quite liked, since it had great art and was more or less 100% attack.
i thought ah, i bet nobody remembers a lot of the actions in here. it's so spirited, maybe i'll post some of it online. but as soon as i got the ok to do so (and wrote fucking tweets pompously announcing it) i began to feel bad.
a greek meme
hipster: we are the granddaughters of the witches you didn't burn
her grandma: cell phones are satanic
being as i am a lazy caricature of a north american anarchist, i find myself interested in learning modern greek. one fun way i like to learn is by translating political banners in photos and greek memes.
Continue reading "a greek meme"
recovered work from The Shotgun
Over the years I've excreted mountains of verbal waste under this and other names. Most of it sinks without a ripple; often the writing I labor longest on is least read. Wind and rain eradicate the self-aggrandizing sand mandalas and no-one's better or worse off for them ever having existed.
Occasionally someone asks after something I wrote that they remember and can no longer find. This has been notably true of "the Curse of Kirsha," the two-of-three part opus I wrote about art, race and real estate in New Orleans for a vanished New Orleans anarchist newspaper called The Shotgun.
Always eager to please, I've accordingly used some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I earn yearly as a successful video game streamer to hire a team of forensic blog recoverists who ventured into the digital Underdark and retrieved these lost manuscripts.
People have also asked me various times, "What happened to The Shotgun?" This is a very good question with kind of a spicy answer. To learn that answer, you'll have to pick up "Funko Wars," a forthcoming collaborative zine with my pal Robb where we EXPOSE THE TRUTH about wrongdoings and injustices!
Anyway, dated approximately for the dates of their original publication (why? I don't know), please enjoy "The Curse of Kirsha", part one and part two, "Carnival Confidential," and "Meet Your Local Clown Fascists."
the fertile grave
i experienced what i would call radical liberation– the wild exponential flowering of possibility– when i accepted that there was nothing in this world for me. no happiness, no affinity, no satisfaction.
this liberation was not epiphanic. it's a practice, a process. it is that most holy act, refusal: rather than a single positive assertion of will, a cultivated assertion of unwillingness.
the refusal manifests as stopping pretending, ceasing to lie to myself about my prospects and (most importantly) turning my back on the infinite vanishing promise of some happier future, that grand bet against which i've already hedged a lifetime of present moments.
a hard habit, the habit of stabbing each moment in turn on the gruesome altar of future joy: tricky to kick.
Continue reading "the fertile grave"
dissecting good propaganda
i don't believe in electoral politics, but i believe in the power of propaganda– or what we in the bullshit business call "narrative."
during her initial run for office a few years back, this u.s. politician AOC 'went viral' with a very good campaign video. now that she's running for re-election she has a new, also very good video. i'd probably get kicked off noblogs if i embedded it but you can view it here.
in a twitter thread, austrian antifascist researcher Natascha Strobl provided incisive analysis of elements that make this 30-second blast so suasive. while i personally feel voting constitutes self-harm, i still recognize master-craft *~narrative~* when i see it.
shoutout to @_plafta for providing context and nuance for some of the german idiom… any fuckups are mine
a disquisition on R's ass
when we study R's ass– when we speak of R's ass– the ass is of course intrinsically of R– literally, mechanically constituent to R– but nevertheless, due to its legendary magnetism and conceptual power, also an almost ontologically externalized aspect of R, a phenomenon unto itself, this extreme… scenario they're toting around.
of course the immediacy of R's ass that confronts us is the cheeks, oxymoronically plush and steel, as expressive as eyebrows; each cheek faceted and yet perfectly, improbably round, like a video-game boulder. the cheeks tho "hot" in the colloquial sense are often cool to the touch, unless they've recently been slapped or squeezed– unless they've been roughly treated, perhaps because that bad lil ass has been spanked, in which case they blush coyly– in which case a fever-warmth rises from them, the ivory marble blossoming into a sunrise of streaky cerise.
Continue reading "a disquisition on R's ass"
about the author
I see the crystal vision / I keep my visions to myself
"revolutionary tourists" in gran canaria
Just downriver from New Orleans is a large (though much-reduced) population descended from Canary Islanders. These "Isleños" came to South Louisiana in the late 1700s and have their own rich conflictual history, including a 1926 insurrection. More on that later, perhaps.
What follows, though relatable to many places, concerns the Canary Islands. It's a (clumsy) translation of a twitter thread about the behavior of "revolutionary tourists" from the Gran Canaria Anarchist Federation, "Combative and neighborhood anarchism from North Africa."
Now that we have survived August, we are going to talk a little about a type of tourism that a large part of the left does not question: "revolutionary tourism". In Gran Canaria we have suffered a lot, to the point of becoming "disagreeable".
Many people from the (Spanish) peninsula, from England, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Greece arrive every summer on the island to "get acquainted." Is this to see how we work, to share ideas, to attend an assembly, to chat for a couple of hours? Only for a minority. The rest come for something else.