‘Then all the screens around me started throwing footballs in unison, and it started to make sense. The future screen, the future TV, is not about cinema but about simulating presence, a carnal ultrafidelity that’s good for sports, and reality TV, and porn. I must have had low blood sugar or something—box stores do this to me—but a vague apocalyptic dread descended upon me, as I imagined these home theaters invading millions of homes and literally sucking the life out of them, like phantasmic vampires, or digitally remastered portraits of Dorian Grey. Screens that grow more lifelike in exact proportion to the ontological exhaustion of the world outside, a world flattened and set groaning under the weight of us, our distractions, our hunger for figments. A verse from the book of Ezekiel welled up from the depths: “Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”‘
Author Archives: d.perry
“Today psychopathology reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic and, more precisely, to be a socio-communicational one. If you want to survive you have to be competitive, and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing amount of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a reduction of the time available for affectivity … If we bring this analysis to the internet we see two movements — the expansion of storage and the compression of time — making online work so stressful.”
“It’s hard to understand movement (moving and travel), and how, when done frequently, it changes you over time: increasingly rendering concepts of home or solid ground both desirable and impossible.”
-Laurel Halo
Surprisingly beautiful and understandable documentary
Phil Elverum from the bands The Microphones and Mount Eerie lived here for a year in Anacortes, Washington. Phil’s description:
There were squirrels inside in the mornings yelling for us to get out because the cabin had been so deeply reclaimed by the forest. Still, there were some excellent times here. Watching Law & Order on a laptop, mid-winter, and the computer shutting down because the battery was too cold. Knife throwing into a tree trunk for hours. Firewood rambles. Did the artwork for “Live In Japan” in there. Fried a weird fish on the outdoor campstove kitchen. Played Monopoly by kerosene lantern. Weird semi-pioneer time.
https://pwelverumandsun.tumblr.com/post/27508160107/yep-cabinporn-phil-elverum-from-the-bands-the
(one of the best live albums ever)
I’ve never felt closer to someone I never knew than I do to David Berman. I hope he is doing well wherever he is now. I don’t know if I’d still be here if it wasn’t for him. I only wish (selfishly) he could have stayed a little longer too.
from David Berman AMA
HEADSTONE:
“HE WAS CRESTFALLEN UNTIL HE WAS ABLE TO RATIONALIZE IT AS A GREAT MISTAKE”
“The stars don’t shine upon us / We’re in the way of their light”
A discounted sundown / Purchases parched grassland
I feel like a light dimming,
a pot cooling to simmer in an empty kitchen.
A widening gap erodes
that deals in missing.
My petrifying instinct
reaches unthinking for something
that has long since passed on.
A mirage of the possible that didn’t happen.
A bastion of hope that again it happens.
A dwindling passion to even
perform the basic task of existing