UPFs (Ultra-processed foods) are food and drink products that have undergone specified types of food processing, usually by transnational and other very large ‘Big food’ corporations. These foods are designed to be “convenient, eaten on the go, hyperpalatable and appealing to consumers, and, most importantly, the most profitable segment of Big Food companies’ portfolios because of these foods’ low-cost ingredients”. Its rationale is that with nutrition and health now, ‘the issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing’, and ‘from the point of view of human health, at present, the most salient division of food and drinks is in terms of their type, degree, and purpose of processing’. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: woods of Michigan sometimes after 2000
The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film directed by Joel Potrykus. The film was released on the 7th of October 2016 in New York City. Sean” is an outcast who isolates himself from society to practice alchemy, accompanied by only his cat. As his mental condition deteriorates the line of what is real and what is not becomes blurred, and as his home kitchen chemistry turns to black magic, he instead summons a demon.The cast only contains two human characters starring Ty Hickson as Sean and Amari Cheatom as Cortez. Other notable characters include the Cat Kaspar and a possum. The cast is notable as it consists of only African American actors, a conscious choice to “take the white people out of the movie” by the director Joel Potrykus. (wiki)
There is no other movie about contemporary alchemy I would recommend more than this one. In a sense this genre breaking of horror, black commedy, supernatural thriller, demonic possession – sez something about the alchemical dabbling of its director that manages to establish these lonely figures not just as figures of pity, of just misguided or heavily medicalized labour force of today.
They all that as well as 21st c eremites, forever loners and over-qualified loosers that try to achieve the impossible which nowadays is fairly everything that was deemed possible only a few generations ago such as a decent job, some sort of stability and free health care.
What they get, is what Michael Taussig identified long ago in South America Columbia coca plantations as the new demonology of capital that maltreats, transform labour into dead labour, and possess everything. This demonology is at large in the woods of Michigan as well. Oxy and other Perdue Pharma products that have been choreographing the pain epidemic in the US Midwest are the sort of additives, the transformative blackout addictive and legal (FDA approved) substances, readily available alchemy that leaves nobody untouched. Potrykus seems to never aim for re-enchantment but somehow, in the midst of disaster and wilderness keeps us close to the low residues of broken quests.
And this is not the quest of Silicon Valley, of quantum computing or of immortalist future-addicted entrepreneurs, but of somebody who is trying to make ends meet and uses the most banal, lowly substances (fast food trash) – peanut butter, Doritos, all the toxic Cola sugary drinks dirge to enact the last invocation, to achieve some sort of disturbed and horrifying immortality in front of continuous demonic attacks, paranoia and hidden commands.
Being prone to nevrosis and increasing bouts of bipolar trouble (what was previously officially labeled as obsessive compulsive) gets a different urgency by being at the center of transformative and metamorphic processes. Some antrhopologists made an important observation – that there is lots of historians, people researching history and aware of changing historical timelines, but there is few who try to understand the processual nature of things, how one things becomes another and under what circumstances. How the change keeps on changing in its turn as Whitehead would say. There are certain alchemical processes at work here that keep on deteriorating, mutating and benumbing bodies and minds. In a sense there is nothing raw, everything is already alchemically modified the instant it is in contact with the elements, with weathering, oxidative or enzymatic non-human reactions. Yet we have arrived from the processed (pickled by bacteria and yeasts, dried by the sun, salted etc) to the age of ultra-processed products.
At the same time, it is an endless delight to compare and find parallels btw early imagery of alchemy and alchemists and this contemporary disciple.
spacetime coordinates: Michigan 1999 just before the 2YK end of the world
Relaxer is a 2018 American comedy film written and directed by Joel Potrykus. Set in 1999, it tells the story of a man playing Pac-Man in a living room.
Have to thank Felix from Mabento for suggesting this one yr ago, which I ignored, and only now managed to watch. Potrykus also directed one of the all-time favorites – The Alchemist Cookbook (2015) based on David Henry Thoreau stint of living near Walden building around themes as slackness and loneliness. The cinematography of Potrykyus I find one of the most interesting developments of indie low-budget US cinema in recent years, that combines brash oddity, a certain perpetual quest element maybe even picaresque one (akin to 1975 Barry Lyndon) with a heavy dose of grossness, a new sincerity about meltdown and a freshly non-neurotypical candor dressed in black comedy garments. It endorses an unprepossessing (unstudied?) unpretentious braindead attitude about the world we leave in – maybe a jackass type of “critical stupidity” (Scott Richmond) that unites the avant-garde techniques of disturbance with online stunts & pranksterisms. I would also include Kajillionaire directed by Miranda July there. Altough completly stuck the main protagonist oozes forth some continuous fount of animal magnetism & obnoxious liquids.
Relaxer could well be the ode to the gamer martyr, a supernatural 1990s Midwestern take on Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, it also pitilessly transforms and ridicules all stereotypes of survivalist preppers, or what it takes to pull trough various challenges, endless gamification challenges and severe isolation without directly decrying the situation or pointing fingers. Relaxer is a new Millennial species, he is not just a couch potato, or the staycation victim of the year of quarantine, he is almost a life long slacker that always strives to reclaim his time back (like C Mudede sugested in a recent article) instead of joining the labour force or finally starting to be able to pay his rent or move out of his mom’s flat. It is also a generation that did not join the startup Californian culture, and that also became its complete antithesis, a sort of ungainly anti- entrepreneurs of slackerdom. This typology is usually vilified in movies – starting with the serial killer stereotype till the white trash family in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Survival here is not preparing against the government trying to take my gun, it might mean (here) finishing playing the n (impossible) level of Pac- Man, riding the glitch or managing the infinitesimal reflexes thats sacred cheat sheet scrolls of others promise. Maybe this is also the living catacomb of hardcore music and postpunk mashup with gaming culture (see the numerous Black Flag and Butthole Surfers, grunge posters on the walls). Survivalist logic is decomposing into a bizarre Robinson Crusoe stuck in his home, the archetype self entrepreneur in his (or his bothers) primordial flat, setting up a weirdo freelance business of impossible prize money offered by Nintendo magazine challenges.
This is a mostly fixed camera movie, just with one character entering a progressive state of taped decrepitude and self-neglect, almost sliding into voluntary homelessness, while at the same time retaining some modicum of re-enchantment, of derisory acquired special jedi ‘powers’. These powers are unclear, if they are conveyed by pulp trash or commercial pop, or useless skills allowing you to actual survive the new austerity of a mechanical Turk, that we will never know. What I appreciate is the brake from the redemptive narrative of Matrix, of messianic Neo pulling himself up or making ‘poor’ sheeple understand that we are just an appendix to machines. There is nothing redemptive to this alternate history of the 2YK and why the dotcom world actually ended or why we are its children, always ready to pick up on the next senseless challenge. Stylistically very diverse, Relaxer also features one of these incredible moments – that could be picked out of the best noir memories, with marvelous actress (+singer) Adina Howard starring as nurse Arin, a rare friend and ex colleague that is able to transmit secret knowledge (the cheat sheet scrolls), offering the only rare moments of genuine care. There’s this sequence where Cortez (from the Alchemist Cookbook), her companion standing in the door tries to rush her adding a few homophobic slurs, while she calmly takes the guy apart, completly switching the whole movie into something else related to what’s more and more unacceptable & harder to ignore. Even the Darth Vader 3D glasses – Scanners like Cronenbergian mind tricks find a way to feel all right & appropriate to the dark comic & cloying situation.
Don’t want to give the false impression, this is both an incredibly funny and painful to watchmovie – nothing happens, yet at the same time, here we have a reality desert eremite, ignoring the outside apocalypse as he in more ways than one brings it about. We are never sure if this is just mental games, finding ways to deal with one’s own insignificance or inability to adapt, or just a paen to that have shown us that relaxation never comes easy, that being at home doing basically nothing is still an uphill battle toward relaxation.
I find that is it decidedly rare that new Afro- or African futurist narratives, histories, speculative worlds make it onto screen, possibly because they exist separately as music videoclips or stand alone movies without literary support. While I do not think in any way that rarity or scarcity makes things automatically more precious, I find it always an incredible surprise to see such a movie being made and circulated. You could call it an extended videoclip, but this is just the more reason to watch it. It is clearly an ode to Luanda city, but also, for me at least, it gestures towards the perfect mix in the sense of teaching us true cosmpolitanism while never giving up on the cosmospolitics of that particular place. Good riddance to the Euroamerican certitudes & obnoxious art house pretense.
It is a universal or dispersed planetary decrepitude, without pushing for the universality or for the so-called atemporal qualities. It speaks of weather, or climate change as it is experienced by a majority in an unmistakable way nowadays. It is climatic without spelling out climate crisis commonplaces. It is ultimately a drift or drop into high weirdness climax that never comes (to pick on a term from Erik Davies picked again from the High Weirdness by Mail catalogue), a jumble of vacous feelings of things liveliness or expenditure, changing natures that leave nothing unturned, including our dreams that seem to escape us & leave us stranded.
A prothean unforced becoming of outer and inner states, of moods like weather reports, or what recently in his last book Michael Taussig has termed Mastery of No-Mastery(MNM) or the ‘metamorphic sublime’. The people all around are changed without showing any significant changes on the surface, yet there is inexplicable things falling, while the representational bankrupcy is even more evident. Evidently Weather charts say nil about this. Climacteric scales have long tipped over and the rigorous and dire reports of the hottest year on record is falling on deaf ears each year, even if suffering and innumerable species (including human lives) are lost as each heat wave strikes. There is ample evidence yet there is also an inability and we seem ill equipped to gauge its full blown swipe.
Harshness does not exclude trembling atmospheric effects.
Air Conditioner starts almost in a pedantic way with a series of dictionary definition of Air, as flow as manner even as style and condition/conditioning – all of which seem to need redefinition according to new events, conditions and dysfunctionalities. Ie what the Global North bombastically deemed merely functional, highly competitive, adaptive and relentlessly improvable – turns out not to be. There is also a lack of ill intent, and the characters responses seem to always have some puzzled, semi-speculative understanding of this unusual situation. I said that this small movie does not claim planetary relevance, yet is speaks globally without shouting, directly murmuring.
It this the hum of the intelligent or sentient thermostats? Is it the dreams and longings of desperate attempts to repair what is un-repairable? You could blame anyone and find culprits, scapegoating is always on others, yet this does not lead anywhere. Or where it leads is one incredible meta-repair shop (not ‘charnel house of history’) – something that is both media museum, hacker lab etc Or a true semi derelict cyberpunk venue (not its Silicon Valley or maker space incarnation) where the mysteries of black-boxed technology don’t get just fixed but somehow scavenged and re-assembled in new and unsuspecting ensembles. Time travel might mean something completely different, it might mean to feel a gush of air, a fresh breath from a broken car AC or wash in the water condensed by all these ACs. The movie is local without being nativist, still it speaks in mysterious names, without explanation, yet it speaks to all – although the security guard is just a security guard, he is a sort of West African griot, a silent bard, a survivor scarred by wars of liberation of events that never get mentioned in the news and only obliquely adumbrated.
Somehow the ordering of events are all about violent interactions of people and objects or rather objects suicidal falling down to earth ground. A rain of suicidal ACs and dazed, always wary humans trying to disentangle and solve enigmas. Even if blaming the AC of ill intent, of exhaustion seems appropriate, one risks acting like a executor of the eternal boss command that just wants his AC back in good order and get on with the job. I cannot praise enough the wandering, meandering soundtrack which makes it even more of a contemporary desert of reality oasis.
Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.
In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.
With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.
It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.
One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Modes of Market Creation and Price Regulation
1. China’s Tradition of Bureaucratic Market Participation: Guanzi and the Salt and Iron Debate
2. From Market to War Economy and Back: American Price Control during World War II and Its Aftermath
3. Re-creating the Economy through State Commerce: Price Stabilization and the Communist Revolution
Part II: China’s Market Reform Debate
4. The Starting Point: Price Control in the Maoist Economy and the Urge for Reform
5. Rehabilitating the Market in Theory and Practice: Chinese Economists, the World Bank, and Eastern European Émigrés
6. Market Creation versus Price Liberalisation: Rural Reform, Young Intellectuals and the Dual-Track Price System
7. Debunking Shock Therapy: The Clash of Two Market Reform Paradigms
8. Escaping Shock Therapy: Causes and Consequences of the 1988 Inflation
Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) in a story about the disasters that result as a middle-aged French film director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) attempts to remake Louis Feuillade‘s classic silent film serial Les vampires. Taking place as it does largely through the eyes of a foreigner (Cheung), it is also a meditation on the state of the French film industry.
The idea for the film was born out of an attempted collaboration among Assayas, Claire Denis, and Atom Egoyan, who wanted to experiment with the situation of a foreigner in Paris. In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep was played by French silent film actress Musidora (1889–1957). Much of the film depicts set-related incidents that echo scenes in Truffaut‘s La nuit americaine (English title: Day for night), to which Irma Vep owes a large thematic debt.
TimeSpace Warps 