A Golden LA production @staygoldenla
Written and Directed by Jimmy Marble @jimmymarble
I really liked this short by Jimmy Marble (never heard or seen his stuff previously). I owe these last gems to Scotto Moore (and Erik D mentioning him in his last AI and Acid Western burningshore news) recommendations on This Newsletter Cannot Save You. Since the lockdown is over everything seems to live a FOMO existence – as if to catch up with everything that could have happened but did not. Maybe it is also a celebratory mood – a sort of death’s dance after death in the midst of several bloody wars, and the quadruple number of fossil lobbyists at COP27-Glasgow. COVID isolation seems suddenly to have evaporated in a purple cloud of vacations, still I am not the only one who feels this lockdown and what came after is one of the most significant and transformative events in our lives. What do we owe to the trail of the sick and dead? I deeply recommend a comics by Julia Gfrörer translated in Romanian by Dezarticulat about plague living then and now and the ongoing Plague Poems. Julia Gfrörer comics make it transhistorical and maybe such difficult anticipative comics make it easier to move with the difficult times we live trough. But zeitgeist is also something that gets pushed away, as there was hardly a recognition of that publication in the Romanian media I am told, even by the ones who should know better and have a long-time appreciation for the sequential medium. Gonna stop here with my toothless rant. I also did not write anything about the “Una cu Pământul” Laid Waste (2017) although it came out at such a significant moment, almost too painful to commemorate for a lot who did not have the luxury of working from home or actually being able to make a living.
The What on Earth heroine wades through the amalgamation of digital and the analog that always seems incomplete. It is not Pizza Delivery mob Wars and exclusive Metaverse clubs a la Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but a lot of bundled insecurities, worldwide misunderstandings and provocations, anxietities felt on many levels. It is the impending absurdist doom and slapstick world of imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, talking lamps and mumbling plants, AI hallucinations. Where are and who are the agents of change when we are following or posting on our foodie account or trying to make the perfect Insta Marble Smoothie? This seems peak depoliticized declinism (as Poenaru puts it). Yet it is good to go look into small creations and dablings into the sticky smoothie of today. Going out in the world or “the return” has never been so difficult, alienating and dumbfounding. We have to give up on thinking that things will be the same, or that we are all going to slide back into our lives.
How to
TimeSpace Warps 