House of Spoils is a 2024 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy. It stars Ariana DeBose, Barbie Ferreira and Arian Moayed. (wiki)
2526 – Goebbels and the Führer / Führer und Verführer (2024)
timespace coordinates: the last seven years of the Nazi state from 1938 to 1945.
Führer und Verführer is a German-Slovakian film, a mixture of documentary and reenactment with numerous historical film sequences. It was directed by Joachim A. Lang . It premiered on July 4, 2024 at the Munich Film Festival . (wiki)
2525 – It’s What’s Inside (2024)
It’s What’s Inside is a 2024 American comedy horror film written and directed by Greg Jardin. It stars Brittany O’Grady, James Morosini, Gavin Leatherwood, Nina Bloomgarden, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Reina Hardesty, Devon Terrell, David W. Thompson, and Madison Davenport. (wiki)
2524 – Divinity (2023) directed by Eddie Alcazar
Eddie Alcazar is an American film director, screenwriter and game developer, raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico by a Bolivian single mom. Warning: some of the imagery might be shocking or explicit, so stop here!
I do not even know how I ended up finding this bizarre scifi exploit by Eddie Alcazar. It does not feature on most of the SF movie lists. Is its that bizarre? I found it quite funny if pretentious – a tribute of sorts to body horror grandees – Brian Yuzna (Society), Stuart Gordon (From Beyond) or Japanese cyber goth master Shin’ya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: the Iron Man). There’s also those ark from the asexual early scientifiction pulps of the Jugoslawien Gernsback era that promised to spread knowledge, and instill scientific curiosity – to the hyper sexual dystopia of immortalist loosership.
Anyway, do expect lots of nudity, a sort of sordid neo-expressionist glam. BW shadows, grainy cyber interfaces, and a cinema that would make good company with extravagant kitsch master Bertrand Mandico (Wild Boys, After Blue, She is Conann). Maybe it is the star-dotted nightly shiny desertic landscape and the demented modernist interiors, an unmistakable BDSM black aura or the bodybuilder testosterone-drenched imagery, but I couldn’t care less that the story is disjointed and the plot is a mess. To me – all the Marvel movies could have been like this if the censorship and prurience of the puritan US didn’t make them safe. Marvel is full of shiny suits but it is missing exactly this dripping, slick, quality of the image, not to mention this grainy Californian combination of muscled hormone-drenched monstrosities and a swarm of models and adult stars that seem all out of place – mistaken participants that lost their way from some perfume add set.
It is an experimental SF that borrows copiously from gaming aesthetics, comic books, and garish pulps. One is more at home in the US at this point, and Silicon Valley especially than the elixir of eternal life, the potion of the life extension, immortalist SV tech moguls.
Who cares where the two brothers came from?
Who cares why they hate or strap Jaxxon Pierce the son of the inventor of the life-extending serum named “Divinity” to his own product? Who cares why there is this group of spandex-dressed women in a white-neutral background realm trying to birth a tree with tentacles? Soderbergh had some say in this for sure.
Should we be surprised that such an invention goes wrong, or should we feel pity that the ultra-rich Jaxxon Pierce gets an overdose of his own medicine? Romania had the Gerovital – a cosmetic product invented by Ana Aslan, a Romanian biologist and geriatrics specialist who invented and patented the Gerovital (H3) product a so-called “fountain of youth” product that supposedly prevented aging. Many famous celebs and politicians around the world used her product, including JFK. Nobody from the future or another planet (possibly the source of the two brothers in the movie) arrived to experiment on her, as far as we know. Divinity in return – due to its Californian milieu I guess, has transformed rich humans who could afford it into self-indulging, narcissistic hyper-sexualized beings greedy for more. It is a society that oscillates between producing sex rape drugs and sex pheromones – and where nothing appears to exist outside of it. I was afraid it was all going to transform into another reproductive futurism movie to pick up on Edelman’s term. Also when seeing the empt generic desert (Sonora? Mojave?) one has to think about the dying mmigrants drying out in the sin and hunted by the ICE. The brothers and the rich investors and inventor families, as well as the mysterious women seem to be the only inhabitants of this world landscape.
I wish the desert would have been more than a backdrop and that the stark surroundings would have been more than a backdrop. What I liked was the mix of claymation, practical effects, and CGI – some if it really effective with a technoccult quality to it.
Here is the 2015 trailer for “FUCKKKYOUUU”, a short film by Eddie Alcazar with music by Flying Lotus.
2523 – Image search: Live Laraaji 1982-1989 (NTS radio mix)
New Age culture and music tapes have been suspiciously white – but there is one very notable and important exception – Laraaji (born Edward Larry Gordon, 3 May 1943), an American multi-instrumentalist who needs no introduction. One can easily say that he has become also one of the key figures of ambient music since his often-mentioned and celebrated 1980 participation in Brian Eno’s last Ambient series who began in 1978 with Music For Airports: Ambient 3: Day of Radiance.
Here is a 2022 (still during the COVID pandemic) interview with Laraaji about telepathy, nomadism, and spiritual creativity and his famous Laughter Meditation Workshops.
And here is a great extended NTS mix by Image Search dedicated to Laraaji. Enjoy!
Laraaji performing live on Celestrana, 1986. Courtesy of the artist.
2522 – Who Made the Planet Sad? -podcast about by Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker Sad Planets book (Acid Horizon podcast 2024)
Dominic Pettman is a media theory and new humanities professor who wrote several books of note. Worth mentioning (and also reading) on my list are – Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire (2020), Infinite Distraction (2015) and After the Orgy: Towards a Politics of Exhaustion (2002). Whoever is interested in the age of distraction, topics regarding the politics of exhaustion, animal studies and new media should check his work. and Eugene Thacker is known for being one of the foremost philosophers of cosmic pessimism, occultural studies, collapsology, the philosophy of nihilism, speculative philosophy, the horror of philosophy (with especially his “Horror of Philosophy” trilogy: In the Dust of this Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, Tentacles Longer Than Night).
With its open and accessible style, unusual for High Theory books, Sad Planets (published by Polity Press in 2024) – promises to be one of the greatest tomes (at nearly 500 pages) of our changing, sad and saddening times, praised by cultural critic Steven Shaviro in a review on Goodreads, as one of “the greatest texts about melancholia in the English language: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon.” I have not read it but it feels (and feeling and affect theory – is an important part of it) that in days of solastalgia – of distraught sensation that irreversible change is upon us comes as a welcome and quirky pillow-book. More importantly, it is not a book that tries to explain away, to moodsplain and shame us for feeling down or melancholic these days. It also manages to scale up such moods and affects to the cosmic level with new exoplanets that we will never visit and still manage to move us. Science fiction has this potential in their view also to help us cherish both our finitude and also understand the unthinkable Instead of famous English cultural critic and polymath John Ruskin’s (1819-1900) – view that the Romantics indulged in bouts of what he regarded as anthropomorphizing pathetic fallacy (roughly attributing feelings or moods to things found in nature that are not human). One thinks also of the lifelong quest and forlorn thoughts as well as black metal theoretizing in Nicola Masciandaro’s writings nourished by apophatic unthought, medieval philosophy and mystical trajectories in the search for the “tears of things”. Also have to mention the Romanian Melodramatic Research Bureau (MRB) investigation of heart rending pop cultural artifacts and capitalist happiness indexes.
Instead of this Ruskinian slightly paternalizing view (shaming the Romantics?), all the above-mentioned mentioned artists and philosophers take affect theory beyond its known and established academic amd disciplinary margins. Pettman and Thacker scale up speculatively affect theory on a cosmic level, taking the Romantic perspective seriously and wisely gathering and gleaning plenty of examples from contemporaneity. Be it science or space exploration news with the tears of Shatner Star Trek actor upon returning to earth from the Blue Origin trip, street encounters or Japanese Buddhist philosophy (concepts like the mono no aware “the pathos of things” derived from the principles of transience and impermanence etc) or today’s scientific reason confronting us with a facticity that effectively extend beyond the human (and os perhaps already post Anthropocenic) making grief universal. Sorrow over what is going on is not only justified but also part of a larger, external, not for us spaceship – a collective moodspace that is drenched and swimming in “negative affects”. Powerlessness and a failure to act over the climate emergency, the realization of extinctionismof thought and species being are where to stay. One cannot be in the middle of the 6th extinction participating actively in it without being affected by this, finding out that Worldcon sponsored by Raytheon by genocidal wars driven by the military-industrial simplex who also sponsor universities, geopolitical tensions the rise of the reactionary ethno-populist parties in Europe – to name but a few overlapping elements of the “polycrisis”. Science fiction and speculative thinking plays an important role at a time where empirical knowledge or mere epistemology doesn’t seem to be enough, or even breaks appart when dealing with species extinction, ecosystem collapse and mass extinction events.
Some have hailed the book not as a pean to depressing times, but as an important Pettman and Thacker also make an important distinction between the planetary and the world (and hence worldling), and hence between a sadness that seems to be nestled not just inside human culture, society, and philosophy but are at the wider heart of cosmic elements. Pettman also contrasts in another interview the possibility of a Disney that is more Spinozist and vectorial nature of affects with the (very American) way to tackle negative feelings in the Pixar animation Inside Out 2 where “your emotions are almost like this corporate team that you have to manage”. They are also pretty clear that modern science is somehow getting to the same conclusions as the so-called ‘primitive’ native peoples of the world that used to live on this planet and who are already living through the end of the world since Europeans invaded, killed, and annihilated much of the environments they lived in.
2521 – RIP Fredric Jameson (April 14, 1934 – September 22, 2024)
The death of Fred Jameson was probably one of the foremost Marxist literary critics, cultural hunter-gatherers, and cultural trends analyzers of our times. He will not be severely missed but also his death marks the end of an era. It is the least I could do – for us and our sporadic readers to manage to celebrate his work on the timespacewarps blog. In bleak times like ours, one has to keep him close. Also have to mention that this month has see the departure of two important and revolutionary figures, each very different but dedicated to emancipatory politics and a more equal and just world, Jameson and German label-founder Achim Szepanski.
Even those who never read any of the many and important books he wrote will recognized the often-quoted phrase: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. It was slightly modified by Mark Fisher and attributed to both Jameson and Zizek. Many have tried to trace it to articles such as the 1979 H. Bruce Franklin’s critique of J.G. Ballard in his essay “What Are We to Make of J. G. Ballard’s Apocalypse?”, there is even a Reddit on it. Another attribution is to his 1980s text (probably his most famous one) – Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (published in 1984 in New Left Review). Yep, he was a white cis dude, but his work was still unavoidable and hard to ignore. With his interest in radical theatre practitioner and playwright Bertolt Brecht, he managed to rekindle and update Marxist critique – and was together with Professor Darko Suvin (who is still alive and well and who defined SF famously as the literature of cognitive estrangement) one of the founders of the modern field of science fiction studies and utopian studies (check Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions). It is high time to start looking back at Fred Jameson’s work which if it is sometimes winded and hard to parse – still remains essential. To go back on that quote here is a version of it:
“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. I have come to think that the word postmodern ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind.” (Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism)
Jameson at 90 was a dossier organized by Verso Publishing this spring in celebration of his Birthday. Check it here (there is a great free text to read by Daniel Hartley, Ian Buchanan, Alberto Toscano, Sianne Ngai, Gerry Canavan, Anna Kornbluh, Kristin Ross and many other important thinkers in their own right.
For ease of sharing, I will post a few of the TW detailing his work and sharing articles or dossiers dedicated to Jameson.
Read here an interview with Fred Jameson by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda.
TimeSpace Warps 