Roy Christopher – Roy Christopher

January 8, 2025January 10, 2025

Mars Kumari: Grit and Grief

When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the lingering Marxism of late-Capitalist society as hauntological, mashing together the words “haunting” and “ontology,” he couldn’t have imagined what the era might sound like. Bay Area beat maestra Mars Kumari captures the grit and grief of loss we all feel now, haunted as we are by what was here and is now missing.

I met Mars Kumari at Oblivion Access in Austin in the summer of 2023, where she gave me a demo CD of her record, I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023). I already had her record for deadverse, Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021), so I was stoked for the preview. She’s moved on and on since then with collaborations in the works with legends like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dose One and a new solo record for Handsmade Collective.

Mars Kumari. Illustration by Eleanor Purcell.

Roy Christopher: How’d you get into making music in the first place?

Mars Kumari: I first started learning music theory through piano lessons from age 6 onward, but didn’t start making my own music until around age 15/16 when my older brother gave me a pirated copy of Ableton. It was on version 8 at the time but 10 years later it’s still my weapon of choice. It took a lot of trial and error to learn (also YouTube tutorials). Throughout that period of time I’d absorb the music my brother listened to via these mix CDs he’d make, which is how I discovered MF DOOM, Del the Funky Homosapien, Crystal Castles, Flying Lotus, Nujabes, and Earl Sweatshirt, among so many others that ended up being core influences of mine.

I spent a year or so making beats by myself until I met my lifelong friends Keyvon and Shishan around 2015, and we all learned to produce and rap alongside one another. In 2019 and early 2020 when I was in university I performed alongside my good friends Nina Spheres and Parish as part of a dark ambient drone trio (collectively titled Nina Spheres). I learned much of what I know about sound design, layering and harmonics from that experience.

RC: More than any era of hip-hop, I hear the second wave of industrial acts (e.g, Scorn, Skinny Puppy, Justin Broadrick, Kevin Martin, the more ambient moments of Meat Beat Manifesto, Wax Trax Records output, et al.) in your work. Is that me just superimposing my own listening history, or do you find kindred sounds in there?

MK: I’ve been getting into the work of Justin Broadrick (specifically JK Flesh) since I saw him at Oblivion Access! I’m familiar with Skinny Puppy and Meat Beat Manifesto, but I need to get into their catalogs more. There are too many artists that influence me to name in one sentence, but Boards of Canada, dälek, Clams Casino, and Burial are some big ones for sure.

RC: What do you call it?

MK: My music?

RC: Yeah.

MK: I usually just say I make beats, even if that’s sort of oversimplifying it. My foundations have always been in industrial hip-hop, drone and shoegaze, but over the last 3 years that I’ve been performing for raves and nightclubs in the Bay, I’ve been listening to a lot more jungle, hard techno, dubstep, digital hardcore, things like that. I had listened to these kinds of music before but being around so much of it the last few years has had a major influence on my sound.

The context and emotions I associate with these kinds of music are consistently integral to the concepts behind my albums. For example, a lot of what I incorporated into Daybreak reminds me of some of my favorite memories of being surrounded by other trans people I love at parties and raves (places I’d be hearing the sort of music that inspired this) coupled with the comparative isolation of waking up the following morning alone in a world that hates people like us. It’s both of those feelings in equal measure behind the sound.

Given how important to the music the memories are, I guess I’d call it hauntology, but to me that feels more like a guiding philosophy and spirituality than a useful descriptor of the way it objectively sounds. There are many different sounds that the word hauntology describes; I think what unites them is more abstract.

Me and Mars at Oblivion Access in Austin in 2023. Selfie by Mars.

RC: What does hauntology mean to you?

MK: Mark Fisher defined it far better than I ever could, but in the context of music I would say it refers to sounds that evoke the distance between yourself and something you remember. The core memory is important, yes, but all music evokes memory on some level. Hauntology centers that temporal distance between you and your memories along with the feelings that may summon (usually nostalgia or a nonspecific feeling of loss). To me it’s more of a guiding set of principles.

However, as a broader philosophy of ghost-like things and temporal disjunction, it strongly informs my relationship to identity (especially gender identity). My own experience of transition has been one of constant tension between past and future selves. Early on, I felt as if the future I had chosen to seal away by transitioning was still haunting me; these days what I feel is more of a sense of having the past selves live on as revenants in my body alongside who I am now. Even the phrase “who I am now” feels relatively meaningless when the present self is never without past or future iterations.

RC: How would you chart the progression of your sound over your last five records?

MK: I put together my first album Anhedonic Mirages (2020) using beats I had made across the previous 5 years which I resampled and reshaped using a lot of distortion, reverb, and grain delay. It serves twofold as an exploration of a new sound and a reflection of where I felt I existed spiritually and temporally in my transition (and by extension the way in which past and future selves behave like revenants). It’s very washed out and bathed in noise and the song structures across this project follow a sort of dream logic. The whole thing is pretty “lo-fi” so to speak; from here I’ve tried to achieve clearer and clearer mixes with each album.

*Mars Kumari Type Beat* (deadverse, 2021).

I released my next project Elysian Mourning (2021) the following February. This album is a bit more sparse and dreamlike; there’s less percussion than in the last album and what is there is subdued. The drones were the focus here. I used my SP-404 extensively for this one; something I like about the original model is the way that electrical noise stacks and multiplies the more you resample something.

Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021) once again re-centers the drums. Some of the oldest beats I’ve ever put out are on here; as such it’s much more varied in its sonic pallet. There are alternative versions of tracks from the previous two albums, beats I started in 2015, and lots of samples from tape reels. I originally released it for Bandcamp Friday that August, and dälek took a liking to it and offered to put that out on deadverse. I’m endlessly grateful that he took a chance on me.

*I Thought I Lost You* (Bruiser Brigade, 2023).

My next album I Thought I Lost You (2023) took two years to complete and release. There were often field recordings and found sound in the backgrounds of previous albums but they’re much more in focus here, serving as leitmotifs. For example, the ambient passage at the beginning of the final track is lifted from a cassette I found with a recording of someone’s funeral. The atmosphere of that room comes through even in the absence of the eulogy. Even when these kinds of recordings aren’t so closely tied to death, the nature of them is inherently ghost-like in their detachment from any identifiable source. All you have is the recorder’s voice, the room they were in, and to a subtler extent what they were feeling. All with no semblance of an idea of who this was, what they were like, or if they’re even still alive. A voice with no name or body is a ghost in my eyes.

Anyways, I Thought I Lost You is stylistically similar to Anhedonic Mirages, but much more refined, versatile, and massive. There are elements of jungle, noise, industrial hip-hop, and plunderphonics, all texturally united with a dense veil of dark ambience. I wanted to instill a sense of immersion into a new world. Conceptually, it’s grief as a dimension. This was released via Bruiser Brigade Records and mastered by Raphy.

*Daybreak* (Handsmade Collective, 2024).

My latest album Daybreak (2024) is my attempt at deconstructed club, fusing hard techno and drum and bass and house with industrial hip-hop and gossamer layers of ambience. I wanted to make something that felt really crystalline and pretty that would sound great on a live soundsystem. Most of the songs here were designed for live performances, and many times I’d audition my mixes by playing them at shows and seeing how it sounded and how people responded. I try to wear my influences on my sleeve less these days, but it is very much inspired by artists like Burial, Arca, and Eartheater. I used a lot more synths and software drums here than in earlier albums (which were mostly or entirely sample-based, it’s more of a 50/50 ratio here). I’m really proud of the mix on this one. This is my first record with Handsmade Collective.

In summary, my sound has always had industrial trip-hop and dark ambient at its core, but over time has incorporated elements of deconstructed club and IDM with an increasingly glossy finish. Improving my mixing from one project to the next has always been a priority, and the results of working toward that are showing more and more in the increased clarity and scale of the sound.

RC: What’s coming up next?

MK: A full-length album with Del the Funky Homosapien has been in the works for most of the year. It’s about halfway recorded, and I’m aiming to have it out sometime midway next year. It’s tricky for me to say how it will sound given that it’s still in the works, but in a way it unites the grit of I Thought I Lost You with the gloss of Daybreak. I just started work on an LP with Dose One as well. There are other LPs and EPs planned as well, including one with my friend Q3, one with Uboa and Hook Operator, a noise EP with Lucas Abela and another solo record. Besides that, hopefully I can get a pet rabbit soon.

January 6, 2025January 10, 2025

Dead Channel Sky

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called clipping. “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.

In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.

Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.

Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? Afterall, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.

On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.

clipping. is very story oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since their conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes both compose film scores, and Daveed Diggs is an actor, writer, and producer. As clipping., they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists (e.g., Pedestrian Deposit, Michael Esposito, Jeff Parker, et al.) as they have fellow rappers (e.g., Ed Balloon, King Tee, Gangsta Boo, Benny the Butcher, et al.). Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” and the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior,” among others.

Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Knocking in the Back,” they employ Pulsar Generator, a 1990s-era sound-particle software program developed by Alberto de Campo and Curtis Roads; on “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose the classic Dutch track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.

Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Listen up! Everything is very important!

Dead Channel Sky drops March 14th from Sub Pop Records.

December 4, 2024January 10, 2025

DC Pierson: Time in the Box

My favorite actors tend to play minor characters. There’s something truly special about the MVPs on the sidelines who score wins for the team without much notice. They get bonus points if they’re also writers behind the scenes. DC Pierson has haunted the edges of my psyche for years. He’s popped up on Community, 2 Broke Girls, Key and Peele, Weeds, and a few Verizon commercials, among other places. Somewhere along the way, I started following his social media antics, subscribed to his newsletter, and found his books. A creator in the true Renaissance style, Pierson can do anything — and make it funny.

I first saw Pierson in 2009’s Mystery Team, a collaboration between him Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, Donald Glover, and the inimitable Meggie McFadden, that also features Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Bobby Moynihan, John Daly, Neil Casey, Kay Cannon, and Matt Walsh, among others. It’s a juvenile adventure that feels like hanging out with your friends, causing mischief during a summer in middle school.

Pierson has also written for the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards. A veteran of improv comedy, his latest creations, “The Architect Who Built New York” video series and an adaptation of his first novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To (Vintage, 2010), are no less silly than his first— and no less serious.

Roy Christopher: I first saw you in Mystery Team (2009), which you co-wrote. In the meantime, the cast and crew of that movie has become a who’s who of modern comedy. How did that project come about?

DC Pierson: That project was the (probably? We’ll see) culminating effort of DERRICK comedy, a sketch group I was in with Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, and Meggie McFadden. We’d made a lot of videos that got popular at the dawn of the YouTube era and pooled any money we made from touring, merchandising, and the barest beginnings of monetization, and along with some money from friends and family were able to shoot a feature. Prior to that we’d written a feature we wanted to try and get made the traditional way, and when it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen we wrote something we could conceivably make on an indie budget, including using Meggie’s parents’ house or Dan’s uncles’ hardware store / warehouse in Manchester, NH as shooting locations.

Dominic Dierkes, D.C. Pierson, and Donald Glover in *Mystery Team* (2009).

Production scrappiness aside the most important part of that process was the writing. Time being money and all we knew we weren’t going to have the chance to improvise a bunch on set and do a bunch of takes. There were a few opportunities to do a little of that i.e., Matt Walsh’s scene with Jon Lutz at the office party late in the movie or Bobby Moynihan’s scenes in the supermarket, but at that point it’s not like you’re rolling for ten minutes hoping somebody will find what’s funny about the scene. You already have something serviceable written and are just watching a couple genius actor-improvisers make it even better like five times in a row and then you get to pick the best one. Going into it with a script where the story, characters, and especially jokes were all solid on the page was key. A lot of that was down to Dan and Meggie’s sense of what was feasible and achievable on a production level — and it deserves to be said, Dan’s ambition and visual sense really kind of made the videos and movie what they were in many ways, and Meggie figuring out how we could actually do stuff in a professional way really none of us were qualified to do in our late teens and early, early 20s — combined with Donald‘s experiences writing for 30 Rock that very much set the tone and the bar for the writing process.

And as for the casting, as you mentioned, we were really just pulling from people in the UCB community in New York that we were part of at that time. It was an incredibly cool scene to be a part of, and I’m still super grateful for it.

RC: That was right at the beginning of the social-media age, and you’ve leveraged several platforms for comedic purposes. Have you had a plan for those or do you just improvise as needed?

DCP: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, no. It’s more like just keep swimming and try to stay visible. I think I took to Twitter because for better or for worse, I like wordplay and obscure pop culture references, and those both happened to be things that were valuable in that medium. It’s been a slower time adjusting to things like Instagram and TikTok, but I think I’m getting there now especially since I’ve decided to embrace making essentially short short solo sketch videos. It’s a combination of where the technology’s at, that I can just make them and edit them on my phone and the computer and don’t have to be terrifically skilled, with the fact that I come from a sketch background. And even though I don’t think it will become as bigger universal as Twitter was in a day, I am having a lot of fun on Bluesky, which is largely a text based platform like Twitter. We’ll see how it plays out, but at the moment it has a good community vibe.

I also have to say I share a certain weariness. A lot of people who are freelancers of various stripes, be they visual artists or actors or journalists or Drag performers of constantly having to schlep our wares from platform to platform, most of which seem Paternally hostile to promotion of any kind, even though we’re told that’s what we have to do and to be honest it is what we have to do. I guess in my case, maybe it karmically balances out because what we were making in DERRICK really did come along exactly the right time for how small YouTube was but that it existed at all. Granted, none of these things were as developed or capricious or even pernicious as they are these days and maybe that’s part of what was so lucky.

RC: You’ve been very prolific, and your newsletter is especially erudite and hilarious. Do you publish or perform everything you come up with, or do you save some things for longer or larger releases?

DCP: Thank you! I have fun doing it, but haven’t done it as much in the last year for various scarcity of bandwidth reasons. I would say in all forms I probably execute like 10% of the ideas I come up with, but that might be a very generous definition of the word idea. I also think — and here I’m quoting Tom Scharpling, author and host of The Best Show who I think is quoting someone else from his life: The execution is really all that matters, ideas are cheap. Of things I actually execute, like write a draft or shoot some of, most of those get out there. I’m not sitting on like a giant archive of unpublished work, though weirdly network effects and internet attention spans being what they are, it’s kind of like anyone who makes things is sitting on a giant archive of unpublished work because it seems like if you’re not constantly surfacing your own stuff, the kind of attention span Eye of Sauron immediately moves off of them. That said, I do have a an essay about going to see the Postal Service and Death Cab like a year ago that I wrote around that time and just never sent out for whatever reason, so thanks for the reminder.

Oh also, even as I say that I have a rough draft of a new book completed, and I need to like lower myself into the whale carcass of that at some point and finish it. More than anything it’s just a debt of honor I owe myself at this point.

RC: “Execution over ideas.” Did you find that as hard to hear as I did?

DCP: Oh, for sure! And if you’re like me — which we all are, in this way — you’re getting older. So if you think about it for two seconds, or stop trying not to think about it, you realize that the horizon for doing all the ideas is getting smaller. That’s a panicky feeling but there’s also something freeing about it. Less time for doing things that seem like a generically good idea rather than the most You idea, the thing that you’re the most excited about.

RC: Your books were the next thing I was going to ask about. I don’t agree with them, but writers always seem to talk about how hard and thankless it is. Do you enjoy the practice of writing?

DCP: I do! I think I’ve even gotten quasi defensive of it in the post ChatGPT era — like, as long as we’ve been putting pen to paper or pushing the cursor forward writers have been complaining about the drudgery and the solitude of writing, and now all the sudden all these tech bros are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have “solved” it and it’s like, hold on — that’s our solitude and drudgery! It’s like the line from some 90s kids movie — “nobody hits my brother but me!”

There was a line in Top Gun: Maverick that resonated with me (a lot actually! I loved that movie!) about how even with all this modern war-fighting technology, success or failure in one of these insane dogfights those Top Gun rascals are always getting themselves into still comes down to “the man in the box,” i.e., the human being in the really expensive fighter plane. The movie is a really thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s own feelings about old-fashioned movie craftsmanship and exhibition vs. the new degraded and rapidly diminishing versions of those things, feelings I happen to strongly share, so that helped. But also, the phrase immediately resonated with me as a good way to explain that ineffable and sometimes frustrating feeling of being a writer who is actually sitting down and writing.

I also have done a fair amount of writing for award shows and things, and when I got to the point where I was head-writing the shows, I realized what a lot of people who’ve done something long enough to ascend into a quasi-management position learn: You get separated from the thing you love that got you there in the first place. I would spend 99% of my time delegating or fielding emails from other people in charge of other parts of the show or in meetings or on calls. I’d be desperate to have time to just sit down and bang out drafts of things we needed for the show but wouldn’t really be able to. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I think I’m pretty good at all that other stuff too, but it’s way less specialized. A gajillion people can type “circling back” in an email window. Not everybody can be (or wants to be) the proverbial Man in the Box. Also the world will intercede in infinite ways to keep you from being that (hu)Man. That line in the Top Gun sequel was a good reminder to try and maximize my time in the box.

RC: My parents were never into music and subsequently have never really understood my life-long love and interest in it. You had a very different experience. Can you tell me a little about that?

DCP: Dang!! Well I’m sorry it wasn’t something you grew up with in the house very much but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you getting immersed in it — maybe because it was something you had to actively seek out or used to define yourself as a separate entity. (That unsolicited uncredentialed faux-therapy will be $125, please). I didn’t grow up in a musical household the same way many friends of mine who themselves are way more “musical,” as in, playing instruments or singing, did — like, it wasn’t a thing where my mom played piano or my dad and uncle would get guitars out and jam at family gatherings. But my parents were both pretty typical boomers (complimentary, in this instance) in that they both had really close relationships to the music they grew up on (The Beatles in my mom’s case and 70s rock in my dad’s) and my dad maintained an active interest in new music his whole life (my mom probably would’ve as well but she died when I was 12 — you can actually just repay me in some therapy about that).

The times I’m most grateful for now, as I wrote about in this essay, are evenings when I’d be visiting home as an adult and some combination of me, my dad, and my brothers would hang out on the couch in the living room in front of my dad and stepmom’s state-of-the-art-at-the-time home entertainment system and switch off playing songs from our laptops. It was a lucky collision of where the technology was at — the peak iPod / iTunes era — and where we were at in our lives as father and adult / college / older teenage sons, and a lot of emotional conversations that might not have happened otherwise were had. Those are the times I most value and the thing I’d most like to have back, though my dad’s gone now too. ROY, MAKE WITH THE THERAPY, PLEASE!!

It’s funny, I’ve been realizing recently that some music has gone from “this reminds me of my dad” — like, folky, quasi-ambient Windham Hill records or cool jazz played by white dorks who looked like NASA engineers — to “this is just music I like and actively want to seek out.” They say you become your parents and if this a form it takes for me, great. I will be listening to some of the mellowest shit of all time.

RC: What else is coming up in the DC Universe?

DCP: So much, I hope! Continuing to work on a feature script adaptation of my first book The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To with my pals Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden. It’s a process that’s had various fits, starts, and tantalizing near-misses with fruition over the years — and along we made this proof of concept short that still rules imo — and it’s at a phase where it’s the most exciting it’s been a long time <knock on wood>.

I’m working on a live show with my very talented writer, actor friend Robbie Sublett that I’m also super excited about. It kind of ties in with exactly where we are in our lives and careers while also — hopefully — having a hook that gets people in the door. To be announced on that front.

I’ve also been posting a lot more short comedy videos to Instagram and TikTok and such, particularly a series where I play “The Architect Who Designed New York,” basically an excuse to walk around and make short, silly, one-liners I can then cut together based around stuff I see. Been really enjoying that. Every time I set out to shoot one I end up with enough material for almost two, so it keeps rolling.

November 25, 2024November 25, 2024

Video Introduction by the UNF Filmmaking Club

Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for an interview about writing and teaching and put together this little video. Check it out!

November 8, 2024November 18, 2024

Torn Together

I first experienced Eli Pariser’s fabled filter bubble twenty years ago, before scrolling the fevered feeds of social media had such a hold on us. I didn’t have a television, but my ex-girlfriend had one stored in our garage. I pulled it out specifically to watch the 2004 election coverage on the news. George W. Bush was up for reelection against challenger John Kerry. For the two years leading up to this election, I had been in graduate school in San Diego. So, no, I didn’t know anyone who liked Bush, no one who didn’t make fun of him, not a single person who had nice things to say. To be fair, I didn’t really know anyone who liked Kerry either, but…

I sat there, by myself, in front of that small cathode-ray television tube, wondering what the hell I was seeing. How could this many people be voting for the guy I was sure didn’t have a single fan on the continent?

That’s what it looks like when your bubble bursts, and you’re exposed to the cold light of consensus reality. That’s when you realize you were duped, but by whom?

One of the first non-children books I read was a biography of P. T. Barnum. My middle-school mind was fascinated by his brash persona and his blatant sloganeering. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he supposedly once said as he curated freak shows and curiosities and co-created the Barnum and Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Thankfully as a young impressionable mind, I didn’t internalize his con-man values. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t need side jobs.

But the silver lining isn’t cynicism, nor are koans like that lost on the tricksters and trolls gatekeeping the path. Everybody knows everything yet fails to notice how far they have left to go and how little air they have left to breathe. That’s one of the defining features of a bubble: It’s sealed. Airtight.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

But we don’t need the internet to be blind to the blight around us, stuck not seeing the things about the world we find too disturbing to know, too annoying to think about, or just plain too inconvenient to consider. We do a lot of it on our own. We all wander through the world with blurry lenses, what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? Burke would say that it was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, then you started seeing it.

Outside the circus, Barnum’s resonant ideas rang much louder than simply hawking curiosities for cash. He served two terms as a Republican in the Connecticut legislature, as well as serving as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Arguing for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the abolitionist Barnum said, “A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit.” In spite of his outdated nomenclature, the man most known as a 19th-century huckster had more progressive ideas than many of the current lot.

Now the terministic screens are actual screens, shiny rectangles, radiant with outrage. Now the most lucrative approach to news is anything that foments fear, anger, and resentment: any reaction is great, but rage is preferred and more profitable. Now the bubbles are smaller, stronger, and finding one’s way out is a lot more difficult. Any semblance of distortion your reality may have been teasing you with, easing your mind with a blur on the lens, a national election will quickly clear up for you. Your brain left broken, your shelter shattered.

October 16, 2024November 18, 2024

The Acker Ethic

I’ve been thinking about allusion, quotation, and sampling in the broadest possible terms. It’s led me both deep into the self and what makes up consciousness and way, way outward into what constitutes reality. Some of the concerns are epistemological. That is, how we know what we know. And some are ontological. That is, how we be who we be. I’m zooming in and zooming out to find the limits of the concepts of reference and recycling.

Before we get to Kathy Acker’s writing practices, let’s start with brief survey of other perspectives:

In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 2006), Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian word-view that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. The act of writing blurs the lines even further.

In his introduction to Cicero’s On the Good Life, Michael Grant writes,

Cicero strongly believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan… When he looked round him at the marvels of the cosmos he could only conclude, adopting the “argument from design,” that they must be of divine origin. He was happy to adopt this form of religion, purified and illuminated by the knowledge of nature, because it justified his confidence in human beings, which was based, as has been seen, on the conviction that the mind or soul of each individual person is a reflection, indeed a part, of the divine mind.

Cicero held a distributed view of religion, each of us representing one aspect of the divine. Evoking both Immanual Kant and Jakob Johann von Uexküll in her book Ecstatic Worlds (MIT Press, 2017), Janine Marchessault writes,

Building upon Kant’s philosophy, Uexküll maintained that the world of every living organism on the earth is different from that of every other organism because of the uniqueness of its sensory organs and its environment; each creature inhabits a unique environment that is uniquely experienced. The world is thus made up of multiple, overlapping environments.

So, on one side, we’re each the eyes of the divine, but if each of us sees ourselves as the center of our own universe, then we all live in universes made up of our own observations and experiences. It’s its own many-worlds theory, even if just by a slight shift in point of view. For the sake of the discussion at hand, let’s adopt the theory—even if only by analogy. When we write, we take on a point of view, make observations, and relay experiences. Now, what if we step outside of ourselves and borrow points of view, observations, and experiences from others?

“I’m not an enclosed or self-sufficient being.” — Colette Peignot,
channeled by Kathy Acker in My Mother: Demonology

Kathy Acker in London in the late 1980s. [photo by Mark Baker]

Experimental writer and all around badass Kathy Acker would do just that. Her writing practice included variations on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, and forms that flirted with plagiarism. During a visit to RE/Search headquarters in 2012, her friend and ex-lover McKenzie Wark told V. Vale, “She would just read a book and re-write it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she would just read Treasure Island and re-write it. You don’t wait for inspiration, you just get going” (italics in original). Wark met Acker in July of 1995 when she was visiting Sydney, Australia. The next year, Wark visited her in San Francisco. Their brief relationship, which largely existed between those two meetings, is chronicled via their collected emails in I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015).

Like everyone who came in contact with her, Wark was irrevocably inspired. Acker left no stone unthrown, no line uncrossed. Wark continues, “When I met her, she had three books… And she was writing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). It’s one-third Treasure Island and two-thirds something else, and she would just read these three books and, almost at random, re-write them.” Acker explained her methods in a1990 interview with Sylvére Lotringer:

I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person text next to the true first person. And then continue to see what would happen. I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. It was a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language.

Like a mash-up artist or hip-hop producer, Acker would sample other texts, recontextualizing them among her own. It wasn’t a shortcut, it was an experiment, an exploration outside herself. Marchessault adds, “The environment described by Uexküll is defined by a multiplicity of overlapping subjective experiences of time.” Acker continues,

What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he “represents” that material. What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.

Acker was not plagiarizing or imitating but representing another’s text. It’s not mimésis or mimicry in the Aristotelian sense. A symbol on a map represents a particular building or destination, but it isn’t imitating that building or destination. As Acker added, “I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.” She was smuggling in other points of view, other observations, other experiences, others. Hers was a proto-punk act of creative destruction.

In her Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?” Architect of a different vector of bomb, one designed to level the pedestals of the literary canon, Acker could have proclaimed, “Now I am become life, creator of worlds.”

Bibliography:

Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.
Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York: Grove Press, 1996.
Aristotle, Poetics, New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.
Michael Grant, Introduction, in Cicero, On the Good Life, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 8.
Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography, New York: Semiotext(e), 2017.
Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, San Francisco, CA: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
V. Vale, A Visit from McKenzie Wark, San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2014, 21.
McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

August 23, 2024November 18, 2024

About Time

The time-travel trope never seems to wear thin. Even a bad time-travel story has its moments. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) was the first full-length novel I ever read, and something about it latched onto my sixth-grade imagination and hasn’t let go. Several of my favorite all-time stories involve time travel to some extent.

“Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes the theoretical physicist Paul Davies in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes.” These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.

Though the concept started in religion, it was popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella, The Time Machine. Mechanical time travel has remained a standard in science fiction ever since. According to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (Pantheon, 2016), H.G. Wells wasn’t trying to explain anything. He was just trying to come up with a “plausible-sounding plot device” for a story.

There are the plausible-sounding back-in-time explorations like the Back to the Future franchise (1985-1990), and the time-loop lunacy of Groundhog Day (1993), as well as the outright hysterics of Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015), but they’re not all winners. Project Almanac (2015) illustrates the inherent paradoxes of temporal travel and their intrigue while still being only an okay movie, but it falters in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time into a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel can be such a cumbersome cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a story with much else going on and even harder to make feel real. And then of course there’s Justin Smith Ruiu’s ChronoSwoop app.

With that said, here are twenty-three of my favorite stories that feature time travel in one form or another.

“Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 79

Time Bandits

The story that best captures my childhood fascination with adventure—and directly follows the feeling I got from A Wrinkle in Time—is Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981). Reluctant to go to bed, a young boy (Kevin) is soon whisked away by a band of tiny time-traveling thieves who’ve stolen a map of the universe from the Supreme Being. Through portals marked on the map, they bounce through time, stealing whatever they can along the way. Though young Kevin has been longing for adventure, soon all he wants is to get back home.

Primer

Written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Shane Carruth, who also costars, Primer (2004) is a D.I.Y. garage sci-fi thriller. It got a lot of attention upon its release in 2004 for its bargain budget, but it’s an achievement at any price. Friends and engineering colleagues Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) build a box that turns out to enable them to travel back in time. The fact that they stumble upon this ability and then use it for fairly frivolous means (stock trades) doesn’t dull the chronologically jumbled plot or the inevitable unraveling of their relationship.

Palm Springs

Right when you thought the time-loop concept was past tense, it comes back around again, just as renewed and refreshed as it is recurring. A destination wedding is the setting for the temporal hijinks in Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (2020). Like the Harlequin in Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” who deliberately knocks a clockwork world out of its scheduled whack, Nyles (Andy Samberg) breaks everyone out of their routines and shows them a different way through the wedding day, over and over again, until Roy (J.K. Simmons) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti), er, shake things up for him.

Timecrimes

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Primer and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues, Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. [See my full write-up in the Econo Clash Review.]

Safety Not Guaranteed

Inspired by a classified ad that ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997, Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) shows how the possibilities of time travel test our loyalties. All of the film’s characters are faced with decision points that didn’t exist before but that point back to issues they should’ve already processed: one applying for medical school, one tracking down his high-school flame, one seemingly above everything anyway. It’s a surprisingly poignant and effective movie.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The narrator in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2010) is a time-machine mechanic. Charles (the narrator has the same name as the author) travels around in his TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, alone save his AI supervisor Phil, his onboard computer TAMMY, and his imaginary dog Ed. His mom is stuck in a time-loop, and his dad—inventor of the TM-31—is missing. That premise and those few details unfold into some interesting possibilities and wild predicaments.

Tenet

Before Tenet (2021), the writer and director Christopher Nolan was often criticized for being all head and no heart, but when he ventures too far into love (e.g., Inception and Interstellar), he falters. With Tenet, Nolan seems to stay with his strengths, one of those being the technical intricacies of time travel. Here it’s not so much time travel as we think of it but reversed entropy. So, within this ontology, if one wants to go back in time, one must travel through that piece of time backwards (i.e., you can’t blink back to last Tuesday; you have to go backwards through all the days since then to get there). This yields unique results and finds Nolan at the peak of his powers. Though someone described Tenet as “a puzzle box with nothing inside,” I say it’s well worth the puzzlin’.

The Shining Girls

“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise. [Read my full review.]

Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U

The babyfaced killer and Jessica Rothe in *Happy Death Day 2U* (2019).

Time-loops don’t get any loopier than this. One of the genius turns in the script for Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, was their use of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as an outline for the loops. Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) follows Tree (Jessica Rothe) stumbling through a similar cycle. In its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U (2019), a different person is stuck in the next day, and given her repeated previous experience, Tree steps in to help. And a third Happy Death Day is on the way!

12 Monkeys

A core thread of 12 Monkeys is Gaston Bachelard’s Cassandra Complex, in which one is given knowledge of the future, but is unable to convince anyone that the knowledge is true. Inspired by a 1964 French short called La Jetée written and directed by Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam expanded it in 1995 into a feature film starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and David Morse. James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner in a decimated 2035, having been ravaged by a virus released in 1996. Cole is sent back to 1995 to try and find the source and stop it, but no one believes his claims of imminent doom.

The Peripheral

After three novels set in the present, The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) marked William Gibson’s return to the future. The story projects all of the hallmarks of cyberpunk both into the near future and much further afield. In the far future, what passes for a government has figured out how to open new timelines in the past (a.k.a. “stubs”) just prior to an apocalyptic event. As in 12 Monkeys, they’re trying to figure out what happened and somehow benefit from it, exploiting the past for gain in their present. The television adaptation predictably deviates from the novel, but is also pretty great.

The Story of Your Life

Logograms from Denis Villenueve’s *Arrival* (2016).

Leveraging a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that the language you speak creates and shapes the reality you live in), the lead scientist in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in Denis Villenueve’s 2016 adaptation, Arrival), starts to see the world through the language of the alien visitors, the heptapods. Their language, like their perception of time, is nonlinear, so Banks begins to experience her story, and that of her daughter’s short life, according to the alien linguistic sequence.

Source Code

What happens to one reality when we change another quantum reality’s outcome? Source Code, the system for which the movie is named, uses the last eight minutes of brain activity we all experience upon death to allow a person to experience a different timeline in another, compatible person (via quantum entanglement and “parabolic calculus”; As William Gibson put it, “The people who complain about Source Code not getting quantum whatsit right probably thought Moon was about cloning.”). The idea of the system is to be able to find out what happened just before a catastrophic event (in this case a train bombing), in order to prevent further events from happening (e.g., a massive dirty bomb set for downtown Chicago). Somewhere between brain stimulation and computer simulation, Source Code does its work. But Captain Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes in for one last shot at getting everything just right (like Aaron’s repeated runs in Primer) and manages to manipulate more than the system is supposed to allow.

Kindred

Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Doubleday, 1979) keeps landing her self-styled protagonist (Dana) in the slavery-era of the American South. Though she meets some of her ancestors, her jaunts are unplanned and unpredictable, making this a harrowing read at best. Among many other things, Butler is one of the few authors to address the physical dangers of time travel, as Dana loses an arm during her first temporal trip.

The Hazards of Time Travel

Can you be nostalgic for the future? In Joyce Carol Oates’ The Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco Press, 2018), the 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is exiled 80 years in her past (1959), finds another expatriate from their present (2039) and thus begins a time-fraught, dystopian love story.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Neffenegger’s debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has already been generative enough to yield a movie and a TV series. In another interesting take on temporal logistics, the time-traveler himself, Henry, makes his unexpected jumps due to a genetic disorder.

Donnie Darko

I’ve already written quite a bit about Richard Kelly’s 2001 Halloween myth, Donnie Darko, but it deserves mention for Kelly’s attempt at constructing a comic-book logic of time travel. As somnambulistic as it is, from the very beginning of the movie, something is off, and the traveler is drawn to fix it. He leverages help from unwitting friends, family, and authority figures to correct the anomoly. [Read my full write-up.]

This is How You Lose the Time War

Cowritten by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War (Saga Press, 2020) chronicles the correspondence between two lovers/enemies in a war over the fate of the universe. This epistolary novel is written from the highest vantage point on time and space I’ve ever seen. Its time travel is only due to its scale. It’s difficult to even describe the scope of it, but thankfully the drama between them is relatable to all.

Before I Fall

Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall (HarperCollins, 2010) puts a YA twist on yet another time-loop story that flows through different stages of purpose and grief. Seventeen-year-old Sam Kingston keeps having to redo February 12, “Cupid’s Day,” and has to keep doing it until she gets it right. Sam approaches the repeated day in ways she wouldn’t normally, surprising her friends and family. Like the novel, the movie—starring Zoey Deutch as Sam—is somehow both dark and uplifting.

Recursion

Blake Crouch has written several compelling stories: Dark Matter (Ballantine, 2017), the Wayward Pines trilogy (the basis for the TV show of the same name), and Upgrade (Ballantine, 2023), among others, but none ignited my mind quite like Recursion (Ballantine, 2020). A billionaire-funded neuroscientist doing memory research on one side, and a detective investigating False Memory Syndrome on the other. When they meet in the middle, well… Things get crazy.

Paper Girls

Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls (Image Comics, 2015-2019) tells the story of four girls on their paper route one morning in the 1980s, who suddenly find themselves in the middle of an intergalactic war being fought across time. There’s an Amazon TV show of this one, too. It’s like Stranger Things but better in every way.

Detention

Joseph Kahn’s 2011 genre-melting thriller Detention is a wild, wild ride. It’s like The Breakfast Club meets The Faculty meets Back to the Future. Through their school mascot, a giant grizzly bear (the time “machine”), secrets about these misfits in detention, the principle who put them there, and their collective past are revealed. Oh, also one of them is a serial killer.

The Future of Another Timeline

Once it’s possible to repair the past, which revision remains? Bouncing between 2022 and 1992, The Future of Another Timeline (Tor, 2020) by Annalee Newitz explores the very notion of what time and history actually mean when you can travel through one to change the other, yet also how everything is connected to everything else.

“Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so am I as I am not.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 81

August 16, 2024January 10, 2025

Reverberations of a Dead Man’s Ego

When an emcee finds a producer who fuels his verbals, he keeps him close. Atoms Fam, Hangar 18, and Def Jux alumnus, Alaska found just such a fire in steel tipped dove on last year’s The Structural Dynamics of Flow. A journeyman in the pits, dove’s credits run way below the surface of things, and his pedigree shows in his ability to keep the rig moving no matter. Once again on the black circles is the inimitable Marcus Pinn, steady adding nitrous to the mix. Over numerous releases in the last few years including two from 2023 alone, Alaska has settled into a style as mature as it is versatile. He knows the course comfortably now, so he can take the turns, open it up, and just drive.

Along for the ride on Reverberations of a Dead Man’s Ego are PremRock and Curly Castro (a.k.a. ShrapKnel), who with Zilla Rocca, make up three-fourths of the Wrecking Crew. All appear on different tracks here, not that keeping them separated blunts their impact in the least. Prem and The Prophet, Fatboi Sharif, are Alaska’s accomplices on “Murder by Numbers,” and fellow Atoms Family member Cryptic One joins Zilla and Alaska on “Disappearing Acts.” There’s also Bateria, a.k.a Jedi Son of Spock, on “Imposter” and Sleeping Dogs on “Vulture Stones,” among others. Those guys are all undeniably dope, but they’re only passengers here.

Alaska never lets you forget who’s behind the wheel as he drops lyrical references to everything from classic slashers and Wu-Tang to Violent Femmes and Hunter S. Thompson. It’s fun, but it’s serious. You can feel the aging aches of “Mild for the Night” in your lower back. You can also feel the frustration on “Hundred Dollar Bills” when Alaska raps, “Yeah, I’m a nihilist, but only ‘cause I’m tired of shit.” Word to the dead man’s ego.

July 11, 2024October 8, 2024

My “Mining Affordances” piece in the Henry Ford Magazine

I wrote a piece about skateboarding for the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of the Henry Ford Magazine. “Mining Affordances” explores the way that riding a skateboard reshapes one’s relationship with the world, the environment, and oneself.

Many thanks to Kristen Gallerneaux for inviting me to do this piece, as well as Jennifer LaForce, Julie Friedman, and all at Octane Design and the Henry Ford Magazine.

You can flip through the magazine or download the .pdf of my essay.

July 8, 2024October 8, 2024

An Invisible Intellectual Speakeasy

Chase Griffin recently did an interview with me for Metapsychosis, a journal of consciousness, literature, and art. Chase is the author of What’s on the Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), the forthcoming Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona\Samizdat), as well as co-author (with Christina Quay) of How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin (Maudlin House, 2023), about the latter of which I wrote,

“How do you like your metaphors mixed? This work of psy-fi docutainment, best ingested by first grinding it into Bookpowder, follows Rocco Atleby’s kudzu plots in the pursuit of fluctuation on the horizon of the Patasphere. Flitting and flirting with spacetimeconsciousness dimensionzzzzz, deep down, heinleined under there somewhere, Chase Griffin and Christina Quay have committed some really serious satire. So pack your pestle and mortar and get ripping!”

Thanks to Chase’s insightful questions, he and I cover quite a lot in this short but wide-ranging discussion.

Chase Griffin: Is there a circuit for you between BMXing/skateboarding and media theory? If so, what’s that sparking thing?

Roy Christopher: Well, in the broadest sense, one of my main research interests is the influence of technology on culture. The study of media—and even that in my mind is quite broad—somewhat narrows the research to where the results of this collision play out. I’m focused on the domains of various youth cultures, so BMX and skateboarding media is where bikes, boards, digital cameras, video cameras, writing, riding, music, and the like converge and capture it all. When you watch a video or see a magazine from a certain era, you’re seeing a snapshot of a culture at that time.

So, yes. I started making zines in the summer of 1986. Ten years later, I started messing around with HTML, and I saw the web as another level in zine-making. Though I was still doing print zines, I learned some basic code, bought some domain names, and starting building websites. The blogs (a term I am still hesitant to own) of the 2000s might’ve been the last era during which I felt like my approach to indie discourse thrived. The social-media silos killed all of that.

CG:Is the feedback loop the only way to go? Is this what makes today’s media such an anxiety inducing place? It feels like it’s not just the geopolitics and climate change? The loops, content aside, can be wholly crippling for many. It feels conspiratorial at times, in a divide and conquer kind of way, to get us all to stop acting in meatspace and live in this anxiety box so that the robber-barons can go on robbing the poor and raping the earth. Is there an alternative to this? Is there a way to create a more positive media?

RC: Last year, I went back to a bar I used to frequent in Chicago, and the same few people were there, sitting in the same places, having the same conversations. That’s what social media looks like after you take a break. It’s always baffling to see the same people posting the same stuff months later.

So, my first inclination is retreat. I’ve left every major social media platform and flirted with a few new ones, but I get fed up and deactivate them every few weeks. It makes for an inconsistent online presence, but I can’t be more consistent with it and still feel human.

Anxiety is lucrative. Once the social media platforms saw the goldmine of outrage, their steering users toward anxiety of one sort or another was inevitable. This has spread to every other kind of media. The goals are not information or entertainment as much as they are to elicit a reaction—any reaction. It’s turned journalists into trolls and the rest of us into dupes. There’s just more money in making people feel shitty than there is in making them feel good.

CG:What is the best way to help others?

RC: Fund their creative pursuits. Every problem I see my artist and writer friends and colleagues having is because there’s no money to do the cool things they want to do. I have the same problems, but I’ve sacrificed things and adjusted my lifestyle to facilitate the creative work I want to do, and subsequently I get to do some of it. The internet democratized and simultaneously demonetized everything.

To put it simply in a slogan: pay for art.

CG:I feel like we should all get together and create a better media. I miss the promise of the user-generated utopia. Do you think coding and computer engineering should be taught in public school widespread and starting at an early age? Do you think that if everyone speaks the new Latin, we can jumpstart society and get along without the new greedy and incompetent priest class?

RC: I can’t help but be cynical about the state of media at this point. The promise of the user-generated world has been fulfilled, but it’s no utopia. Computers, the internet, and ubiquitous cameras and screens have democratized every form of creativity. If one can be a “content creator” simply by aiming a lens, we’re not exactly honoring human creativity. DJ Scratch once said that the reason we respect something as an art is because “it’s hard as fuck to do.” Is the bar getting higher or lower?

A lot of my current students have majors that you would think would help (e.g., computer science, data science, information science, etc.), but the truth is that not everyone should be doing this stuff. The barriers to entry that existed before the internet were not tuned properly, but take a quick look at your feed, and you’ll see that we need some of them.

I think it’s all going to get a lot worse before there’s even a chance of it getting better.

CG:What does your ideal virtual community look like?

RC: A real-life secret salon. An invisible, intellectual speakeasy. I know a lot of smart, creative people. If I had a place to meet all of them on a regular basis and exchange ideas and collaborate on projects, that would be the ideal virtual community. If you went looking, you’d never find us.

Many thanks to Chase Griffin for doing this interview, Metapsychosis for publishing it, and you for reading and sharing it.