time machine // database // travel guide
The Night House is a 2020 psychological horror film directed by David Bruckner. It stars Rebecca Hall as a widow who discovers a dark secret about the house her late husband built. Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, and Vondie Curtis-Hall also star. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1903 around Auckland in the British colony of New Zealand
Tracker is a 2010 British–New Zealand action-thriller film directed by Ian Sharp and starring Ray Winstone as a renowned Afrikaner commando leader of the Second Boer War and a master tracker & Temuera Morrison as a Maori harpooner on a whaling ship. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: late 2010’s Tokyo at night
Kate is an American action thriller film directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson, Michiel Huisman, and Tadanobu Asano. It was released on September 10, 2021, by Netflix. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1937 rural Mississippi during the Great Depression
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 crime comedy-drama film written, produced, co-edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson, with Chris Thomas King, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning in supporting roles.
The film is a modern satire loosely based on Homer‘s epic Greek poem The Odyssey that incorporates social features of the American South. The title of the film is a reference to the Preston Sturges 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels, in which the protagonist is a director who wants to film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a fictitious book about the Great Depression. (wiki)
First much appreciation for both Phil Ford and J F Martel. I do not manage to listen to them as often as I could, but when I do, it is always a blast. That is why one needs friends (not friends-bosses or friend-unfriend dynamics as talked about in this piece. Friends to recommend and catch one looses trough a web cast to widely.
What I appreciate about their heady mix is first the way they never belittle and be dissmissive with their subjects, their topics (and their public) their humility and modesty in front of such vast subjects.
No matter how diverse or dispersed things are and rabbit holes go – they always manage to follow a certain waveform, play on certain motifs. They can combine high theory (Deleuze), avant-garde (Burroughs) with the most harrowing examples of heroin addict descriptions. They can both make a sociology of taste, follow on the strictures of Bourdieu, while at the same time catching a strong whiff of spirituality in Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, while at the same time finding religious (initial sin) groundings of Marxist critique of commodification, ideology and cultural superstructure. They can talk about the merits of secular society, while at the same time pointing towards the commodification behind new religions, prosperity gospel, as well as the sort of spiritualized practices, anthropotechnical hacks that are everywhere – from Silicon Valley to self-actualization corporate seminars. They decry the anxiety of cultural appropriation, its totalizing and too large terrain – while at the same time they weigh in on all the decontextualized, fetishized spiritualism, that leaves all the burden, the suffering out. They take the critique of Buddhism by Zizek, the Buddhist apparent integration of human universal suffering, while at the same time warning about the free style of new ironic class, the distinction proffered by hipster irony-non-irony thin line and the constant hard to learn code switching. One of my favorites is the part about friends – about Buddhas (and especially Osho’s speech on friendship!) sermon about the future master transforming into friend, never so true as in today’s corporate culture. Societies of control complete changed the rule of the game that went hand in hand with a changed definition of friendship, removed from the one inherited from Aristotle.
In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try.
REFERENCES
Chapman and Maclain Way (dirs), Wild Wild Country
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Peter Sloterdijk, German cultural theorist
Weird Studies, Episode 47, Machines of Loving Grace
Slavoj Žižek, On Western appropriation of Eastern religions
William Burroughs, American writer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Bhagwan Rajneesh/Osho, Speech on friendship
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
James Carse, The Finite and Infinite Games
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.
TimeSpace Warps 