anorthodox

Rat King

2012-02-14T11:20:00.000Z

"Rat kings are phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, ice, excrement or simply knotted. The animals reputedly grow together while joined at the tails. The numbers of rats that are joined together can vary, but naturally rat kings formed from a larger number of rats are rarer. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported. Historically, there are various superstitions surrounding rat kings, and they were often seen as an extremely bad omen, particularly associated with plagues."

Leviathan

2012-01-27T16:22:00.001Z

La Fábrica de Muñecas

2012-01-08T15:43:00.000Z

A kiln in an abandoned doll factory. Creepy dismembered dolls after the leap of faith (and in spanish here).

What Is To Be Undone

2011-10-19T12:03:00.002Z

The hate and the violence in my heart, you put it there. All I am doing is trying to get rid of it. Every stone, every hit, every smashing thing, every barricade on fire carries a little hate with it. A tiny bit of violence that you gave me without asking me if I wanted it. So now you're getting it back.

And one day, when it has all left me. I will realise that I have no more hatred to give. No more violence to return to you. I'll probably cry.

Family

2011-09-28T17:52:00.000Z

Papa Ghede & Mama Lola

Happy Birthday Mein Führer... I mean Mr President

2011-09-20T18:08:00.002Z

This is a poster/flyer for a Down/Melvins/Weedeater concert. Probably the best thing. Ever.

The original can be found here.

Ignorance and Fear

2011-08-01T16:20:00.000Z

This is a 1918 german anti-anarchism propaganda poster. It reads: Misery and destruction follow anarchy.

Death to Art Critics

2011-07-24T15:07:00.000Z

Fuck Roger Ebert. Yes, fuck him. Fuck film critics in general. Some people hate artists because they're pretentious or arrogant. I don't, they're just fools. But art critics. Oh. They are the parasite that feeds off the fool. And everyone else. They survive by trying to convince people that their opinion weighs more than anyone else's. And while they try to convince everyone else they also convince themselves. So they slowly adopt the appearance of a judge, condemning or praising a piece of creation based on their own, oft ill-informed, subjective criteria.
I fucking hate art critics. And most of all film critics. They have even developed their own dialect which they try to make more and more exclusive so that people will feel more and more stupid for not being privy to their secrets. In essence, it is yet another glorified boys' club.
Not to mention they diss films I like and praise some of the dullest, most uninspired shite that was ever shat into creation. So yeah. Fuck them.

Chasseurs de Skins

2011-07-19T13:35:00.001Z

These young men refused the brand of victimisation through the technique of cracking nazi skulls. And here I am, unable to stop thinking how hot they look.

The Fierceness

2011-07-15T07:54:00.000Z

Pat's Komodo Dragon

2011-07-14T14:23:00.000Z

Where'd You Get Those Peepers?

2011-07-13T16:00:00.001Z

The Butterfly and the Chair

2011-07-12T13:49:00.000Z

Excerpt of a letter from Subcomandante Marcos to Angel Luis Lara, 12 October 2002.

the butterfly

Rebellion is like the butterfly that flies out towards that sea without islands or rocks. It knows that there will be no resting place, and yet it does not waver in its flight. And no, neither the butterfly nor rebellion are foolish or suicidal; the thing is, they know that they'll have a resting place, that out there is a huge old island that no satellite has ever detected. And this big island is a sister rebellion which will set out just when the butterfly, that is, the flying rebellion, starts to falter. Then the flying rebellion, that is, the sea butterfly, will become part of that emergent island, and will be the landing point for another butterfly already beginning its determined flight towards the sea. This would be no more than a mere curiosity in biology books, but as I-don't-know-who said, the flutter of a butterfly wing is often the origin of the greatest hurricanes. With its flight, the flying rebellion, that is, the butterfly, is saying NO!

No to logic. No to prudence. No to immobility. No to conformism.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, will be as wonderful as seeing the audacity of that flight, appreciating the challenge it represents, feeling how it starts to agitate the wind and seeing how, with those drafts, it is not the leaves of the trees that tremble, but the legs of the powerful who until then naively thought that butterflies died if they flew out over the sea.

...........................................................

And there are times that butterflies from all over gather, and then there is a rainbow. And the task of butterflies, as any respectable encyclopedia will tell you, is to bring the rainbow down closer so children can learn how to fly.

the chair

The Revolutionary (like that, with capital R) scorns ordinary chairs and says to others and himself: “I don't have time to sit down, the heavy mission commended to me by History (like that, with capital H) prevents me from distracting myself with nonsense.” He goes through life like this until he runs into the chair of Power. He throws off with one shot whomever is sitting on the chair, sits down and frowns, as if he were constipated, and says to others and himself: “History (like that, with capital H) has been fulfilled. Everything, absolutely everything, makes sense now. I am sitting on the Chair (like that, with capital C) and I am the culmination of the times.” There he remains until another Revolutionary (like that, with capital R) comes by, throws him off and history (like that, with small h) repeats itself. The rebel (like that, with small r), on the other hand, when he sees an ordinary chair, examines it carefully, then goes and puts another chair next to it, and another and another, and soon, it looks like a gathering because more rebels (like that, with small r) have come, and then the coffee, tobacco and the word begin to circulate and mix, and then, precisely when everyone starts to feel comfortable, they get antsy, as if they had ants in their pants, and they don't know if it's from the coffee or the tobacco or the word, but everyone gets up and keeps on going the way they were going. And so on until they find another ordinary chair and history repeats itself. There is only one variation, when the rebel runs into the Chair of Power (like that, with capital C, capital P), looks at it carefully, examines it, but instead of sitting there he goes and gets a fingernail file and, with heroic patience, he begins sawing at the legs until they are so fragile that they break when someone sits down, which happens almost immediately.

Shamelessly taken from here
The whole thing here (in .pdf)

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Fuck You and the Horse You Rode in on

2011-07-11T14:34:00.000Z

The Last Will and Testament of Alexander Dragoumis

2011-07-08T15:44:00.001Z

My name is Alexander Dragoumis and this is my last will and testament. I sense my end coming and I cannot help but feel blessed by Lady Fortune that my life will end by natural means. I have lived to see things no man should see, things I could not have hoped to see and retain my sanity. And yet I did. But perhaps that is not so fortunate. Maybe I should have lost my mind along with my naivete. Maybe then I would not have to carry this burden. But I cannot complain about what life dealt me.

I used to be a ruthless man in my youth. A greedy little runt. Never looking beyond bottom lines and personal gain and for that I am sorry. But for some things I do not apologise. I still find man to be a sorry excuse of a being. A bottomless well into which the hopes of gods are forever cast, never to return. I do not hate man, I pity him. For he is a feeble beast, capable of brilliant ascension and uttermost horror but seldom the clarity to choose wisely between the two. Pardon me reader if these seem the last ramblings of a faltering old mind. My mind is as youthful as it ever was though my body is weakened by time. I have lived through things I would not wish upon my bitterest of enemies and yet my mind has steeled itself and stayed strong. Or at least I think so.

As I said, I was a cold and calculating thing and it was this moral deformity that lead me into the line of work that made me a small fortune. In the shining glory of Smyrna and Constantinople I lived and worked in the dank shadows. I pawned off works of art to the highest bidder, effectively selling off the great culture of Asia Minor. At the time I may have rationalised what I did as providing a service to noble people that knew how to appreciate exquisite cultural artifacts but I see now that it would not have mattered what I sold and to whom as long the price was right.

It was this social degeneracy of mine that lead me to flee with as much money as I could the troubles of Smyrna. I should have burned in its flames. Cruel but fair is the judgment of our future selves and woe to the man that fails himself as an old man for he shall be cast into non-existence. I have to live with the things I did and I can only hope that in the balance of my judgment my evils will not outweigh any selflessness I may have shown. I fled to Athens and slowly resumed my loathsome work there with a fledgling gentry almost literally devouring anything I could bring over. It helped that some of my clients were military men. The imperialist Greek army did most of my dirty work while I was in Greece. Soon I had enough funds and influence to try and get back to Constantinople and maybe even Smyrna to build again my foul business.

I booked a ticket on the Orient Express and that was what condemned me and enlightened me. I have seen unspeakable horrors, O reader, the human form twisted and mutated until it is a mere mockery of its former self. Innumerable human lives treated casually as we treat dirt and dust. I looked into Insanity’s gaping maw and felt irresistible forces pull me in. I cannot pretend it was my resilience that saved me, nor my cunning, though I had plenty. It was sheer, dumb luck. I was a mere plaything in the infinite playroom of gods and though I was occasionally rattled, I was never broken.

On that damned train ride I met a group of what now only seems as a group of broken and insane folk. People that had been poked and prodded once too many by the gods, their minds now lesser than what they used to be. I cannot blame them now, I used to, for surely they suffered much more than I did. They never trusted me and how could they. Our lives became inexplicably entwined on that train after facing a vile creature which at the time terrified me but only because I did not yet know what was to follow.
I saved them and I am ashamed to admit that I felt vengeful that they did not recognise it. As if the goal of selflessness was profit. Such an imbecile I was. I helped them time and time again, facing unspeakable terrors with them until a horrible accident befell me and I was left with incurable wounds. They left me without a second thought and I must admit I blame them too for what I did next even though I take most of the responsibility. I betrayed them to enemies that then seemed inconsequential until I found out that bigger things were at stake than our little insignificant lives.

What fools men are. And our enemy was the biggest one. I took great pleasure in killing him and enjoyed it even more the second time around. I kept them safe from danger and they did not even know it, let alone acknowledge it. In the end, when I had stopped caring for my life we faced cruel, cavernous intellects beyond the planes that any mortal should ever be allowed to inhabit. Elder gods that no living thing should ever have to face no matter how heinous its crimes. And yet we survived.
I left them and everything else behind. No kind of normalcy could ever be expected after that. We never really became friends. Necessity kept us together and now I felt that I was needed elsewhere. Smyrna pulled on my soul and now I knew what I had to do. Since then I have dedicated my life making sure that no man will ever have to face what I did. I have uncovered every possible kind of artifact imaginable that channeled powers that should not be and made sure it would become unusable.

I am a man that has made his peace with how the world is and with himself. I hope I have redeemed myself and I hope I leave the world in a slightly better shape than when I found it. May no man ever see the things I have seen and if they do, may the gods grant them mercy in the form of insanity or a swift death.

Smyrna, 11th August 1953

Nicolas Lampert

2011-06-23T06:47:00.000Z

Moar.

Sanjhih

2011-06-19T06:58:00.000Z

It's futuristic. It's haunted. It's abandoned. It's the pod-town in Taiwan. More pictures here.

Post-Revolution Blues

2011-06-16T15:48:00.000Z

I think I'm suffering from a light case of burn-out. Yesterday I practically pushed myself beyond my limits. I woke up at 7:30 in the morning, had a small and quick breakfast that was going to be my only meal for the next 12 hours. I traveled in a train packed with early commuters to the centre of Athens to meet with the people from my union. There we joined in solidarity with another union to block the entrance to a huge coffee shop that has been using and abusing its employees. That was an amusing way to wake up and start your day. After that we handed out a call for more people to join our union and joined another three unions to form a bloc that then marched all the way to the central square of Athens. I held the banner too.

I was hot, thirsty, possibly sunburnt already and a bit tired. I spent some time with the people I've met in the union and when shit started getting kicked, and they decided to leave, I stayed and watched and participated depending on the tides of battle I suppose. I inhaled cubic arseloads of teargas and various asphyxiants and thank fuck I was wearing a mask otherwise I may have been deadified by now. I came face to face with plenty a pig in all shapes and colours and I walked tens of kilometers.

We built and lit barricades, flung rocks, insults and other debris at cops and tried to protect ourselves and other people, some of whom didn't even want us there. That's the shittiest thing of all. To be treated like an unwanted servant. Fuck you lady. I didn't come here for you, I came here for me. I'm alive and you're still dead. Underneath the mask I'm smiling.

I met a lot of people, I like most of them and I was genuinely happy. I only had water and cigarettes, I was definitely sunburnt and dehydrated by the end of it, very dirty and tired but I was fucking happy. The explosions didn't scare me or the fire. That's not to say I wasn't scared. This was happiness resulting from fears being faced and defeated.

Today, I'm healing. Apparently the government will be changing but that won't change my life. Or the life of most other people. It'll still be "same shit, different asshole". And I'm kind of down today. I feel like a wild animal that has been caged for all its life, has tasted freedom for a day and then has been shoved back in its cage. I still have to find a shitty job to pay my shitty rent. But yesterday. O yesterday I lit fires.

Society of the Spectacle

2011-06-11T15:42:00.000Z

In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which cannot truly know itself, the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudorevolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws of thought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears in the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

Guy Debord

2011-06-10T11:55:00.000Z

The slogan ‘Revolution or Death!’ is no longer the lyrical expression of consciousness in revolt: rather, it is the last word of the scientific thought of our century. It applies to the perils facing the species as to the inability of individuals who belong. In a society where it is well known that the suicide rate is on the increase, the experts had to admit, reluctantly, that during May 1968 in France it fell to almost nil. That spring also vouchsafed us a clear sky, and it did so effortlessly, because few cars were burnt and the shortage of petrol prevented the others from polluting the air.

And Not a Single Fuck Was Given That Day

2011-06-02T23:55:00.001Z

‘Hell Hath No Fury’: A Chronology of Genderfuck Insurrection

2011-05-26T14:32:00.001Z

Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.
- Silvia Rivera

The chronology below requires little introduction; the actions of all these rioters speak for themselves. Suffice to say that this chronology is a small attempt to address a fallacy in popular conceptions of insurrection—that insurrection is ‘macho,’ masculine, or that it reinforces gender norms. It should also address another fallacy in the commonly understood chronology of queer and trans resistance—the one that says “Stonewall was first.”
A note on language. Any terms we apply anachronistically will fail to reflect the ways these individuals and collectives identified. Moreover, we have first-hand accounts from none of these rioters, except some Stonewall and Compton’s participants. Since any language we choose for such a broad span of time, place and culture will be historically inaccurate, we just say genderfuck insurrection. It has the nicest ring to our ears.
Genderfuck is an active term; it speaks of a force that acts upon gender normality. This is more interesting to us than other terms that are passive and speak of identity, which attempt to freeze and quarantine gender transgression into special individuals.
Our tour begins in Greece, the cradle of democracy and the location of the most recent massive insurrection against the false hope of democracy…

390 – Thessalonica, Greece. Butheric, the commander of the militia, arrested a popular circus performer under a new law that punished “male effeminacy.” The people of Thessalonica, who loved the performer, rose up in rebellion and killed Burtheric. In response to the insurrection, authorities rounded up and massacred three thousand people.

1250 – Southern France. A small crowd of cross-dressed males pranced into the home of a wealthy landowner. They sang “We take one and give back a hundred,” and ignored the protestations of the lady of the house as they looted the estate of every possession.

1450-51 – Cade’s Rebellion in Kent & Essex, England. Led by the “servants of the Queen of the Fairies,” the peasants broke into the Duke of Buckingham’s land and took his bucks and does.

1530 – ‘New Spain.’ During his campaign of conquest against communities of resistance in western portions of “New Spain,” Spanish conquistador Nuño de Guzmán wrote of a battle. The very last indigenous warrior taken prisoner after the battle was, in the conquistador’s words, “a man in the habit of a woman” who had “fought most courageously.”

16th century – Europe. Urban carnivals throughout Europe integrated cross-dressing and masks as key elements. The festivals were organized by societies of unmarried ‘men’ with trans personalities. They were called the Abbeys of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason, ‘Mére Folle and her children,’ and others. During festival, they would ‘hold court’ with mock marriages and issue coins to the crowds. They made fun of the government, critiqued the clergy, and protested war and the high cost of bread.

1629 – Essex, England. Grain riot led by ‘Captain’ Alice, who was trans.

1630 – Dijon, France. Mére Folle and her Infanterie went beyond throwing carnivals and mocking elites. They led an uprising against royal tax officers. As a result, a furious royal edict abolished the Abbey of Misrule.

1631 – England. Riots again enclosure led by ‘Lady Skimmington’ drag mob.

1645 – Montpellier, France. Tax revolt led by La Branlaire, who was called by a term for masculine women.

1720 – The Caribbean Sea. Untold numbers of trans pirates sailed across the open seas in the Golden Age of Piracy. It was not altogether uncommon at the time for “women” to “pass as men” while sailing in the navy, on mercantile ships, and as pirates. The two most well-known trans pirates of the era are Read and Bonn. They sailed together with Captain John Rackham, and their stories are known from when they were put on trial for piracy. They were said to be the most fierce and courageous fighters in their crew. Like most pirates, they were faggots.

1725 – Covent Garden Molly House Rebellion, London, England. Since 1707, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners carried out systematic attacks on London’s queer underground. More than 20 “molly houses” were raided by police in London and many “mollies” (mtfs) publicly dragged and hung for cross-dressing. But on one day in 1725, the police attempted a raid of a Covent Garden molly house, and the crowd of mollies, many in drag, fiercely and violently fought back.

1728-1749 – Toll Gate Riots in England. “To cite but four examples, toll gates were demolished by bands of armed men dressed in women’s clothing and wigs in Somerset in 1731 and 1749, in Gloucester in 1728 and in Herefordshire in 1735.”

1736 – Edinburgh, Scotland, “the Porteous Riots, which were sparked by a hated English officer and oppressive custom laws and expressed resistance to the union of Scotland and England, were carried out by men disguised as women and with a leader known as Madge Wildfire.”

1760s – White Boy commons restoration movement in Ireland. The ‘White Boys,’ a peasant guerrilla group who called themselves ‘fairies’ and did mischief at night, were a central feature of the rural class war. They destroyed enclosures, sent threatening letters to elites, reclaimed properties seized by landlords, and freed bound apprentices. They were finally put down by armed force. Their spirit inspired the formation of the ‘Lady Rocks’ and ‘Lady Clares’ in the 1820s and 1830s, and the later Ribbon Societies and Molly Maguires—all were involved in Ireland’s anti-enclosure and anti-colonial struggles and all cross-dressed.

1770s – Beaujolais, France. ‘Male’ peasants dressed as women attacked surveyors assessing their lands for a new landlord.

1812 – ‘General Ludd’s wives’ loom riot, Stockton, England. One of the early Luddite Rebellions against the Industrial Revolution was led by “General Ludd’s wives,” two cross-dressed workers. The mob of hundreds broke windows, stoned the house of Joseph Goodair, a factory owner, and later set fire to his house. They destroyed the products in the steam loom factory, smashed the looms and burned the factory to the ground. The rioting went on for four days until it was stopped by the military at Stockport, and then broke out again at Oldham.

1820s – Ireland. The ‘Lady Rocks’ militant Irish resistance group active; inspired by the White Boys, they wore bonnets and veils.

1829 – The War of the Demoiselles in the Pyrenees. A peasant uprising against restrictive forest code in which the peasants cross-dressed.

1830s – Ireland. The ‘Lady Clares’ militant Irish resistance group active; inspired by the White Boys, their ‘official’ costume was cross-dressing.

1839-1844 – Welsh Toll-gate Riots, carried out by ‘Rebecca and her daughters.’ One well-documented instance was on May 13, 1839. At dusk, a call of horns, drums and gunfire are be heard across the western Welsh countryside. Armed male peasants, dressed as women, thunder up on horseback, waving pitchforks, axes, scythes, and guns. As they storm the toll gate their leader roars: “Hurrah for free laws! Toll gates free to coal pits and lime kilns!” These demands are punctuated by a cacophony of music, shouts, and shotgun blasts. The rebel troops smash the toll barriers and ride away victorious. They call themselves “Rebecca and her daughters.” The Rebeccas are active for four years in Wales, leading thousands of cross-dressed “daughters” in the destruction of turnpike toll barriers. They receive widespread popular support.

1843 – Militant resistance group the ‘Molly Maguires’ active in Ireland. Inspired by the White Boys, the word “Molly” was the vernacular equivalent of what we might call “queen” today.

1959 – Cooper’s Donuts Riot, LA Los Angeles, May 1959. Police attempted a raid on Cooper’s Doughnuts, a late-night hangout for drag queens, butch hustlers, street queens and johns. The cops demanded IDs. The queers fought back. Doughnuts and coffee cups become projectiles. Fighting spilled out onto the street. The cops, taken by storm, called for backup. Rioters were arrested and the street was closed off for a day.

1966 – Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, San Francisco, August 1966. Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night hangout for drag queens, and hustlers in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The restaurant management called the police on a group of young queens who were being rowdy. A police officer who was used to roughing up Compton’s regulars grabbed a queen. She threw her coffee in his face. A fight broke out. Plates, trays, cups, and furniture were thrown. The plate-glass windows of the restaurant were smashed. Police called for backup as the riot took the street. The windows of a cop car were smashed and a newspaper stand went up in flames.

1969 – Stonewall Riot, New York City, June 28. The police conduct a ‘routine’ raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. They began to round up trans people, drag queens and kings to be arrested for cross-dressing, which was illegal. Hostility grew and grew until an officer shoved a queen, who responded by hitting him on the head with her purse. The crowd became fierce. Cops were pelted, first with coins and then with bottles and stones. When a bull-dyke resisting arrest called to the crowd for support, the situation exploded. The crowd tried to topple the paddy wagon while the police vehicles got their tires slashed. The crowd, already throwing beer bottles, discovered a cache of bricks at a construction site. Cops were forced to barricade themselves inside the Inn. Garbage cans, garbage, bottles, rocks, and bricks were hurled at the building, breaking the windows. Rioters ripped up a parking meter and used it as a battering ram. The mob lit garbage on fire and sent it through the broken windows; squirted lighter fluid inside and lit it. Riot police arrived on the scene, but were unable to regain control of the situation. Drag queens danced a conga line and sang songs amidst the street fighting to mock the inability of the police to re-establish order. The rioting continued until dawn, and for the next four days. Crowds filled the streets and smashed more cop cars, set more fires, and looted stores.

1970 – New York City. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, veterans of the Stonewall riots, formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Marsha and Sylvia opened the STAR house for homeless drag queens and runaway queer youth to stay in. The house mothers hustled to pay rent so their kids wouldn’t have to. The youth, in turn, stole food to bring home. STAR linked up with the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican group, and with the Black Panther Party.

http://gendermutiny.wordpress.com/

Devastation

2011-05-15T08:06:00.000Z

More here.

Spomenik

2011-04-27T10:19:00.000Z

Check that motherfucker out! That is truly, in the original sense of the word, epic. If only if it wasn't tied to so much pain and tragedy.

There are hundreds of them scattered throughout villages and rural landscapes in the former Yugoslavia. Once the site of pilgrimages by schoolchildren, military veterans, patriots, and mourners who had lost family in WWII, these Spomeniks (monuments) are today rarely visited. Often built out of concrete in a style dubbed Brutalism, these secular totems were meant to endure, impervious to the mere march of time—a testament and continuous witness to the new unity of the historically fractious Balkan states—the unity of all the Slavs, YUGOSLAVIA.

See more of them Brutalist monuments over nhya.

Upon arrival

2011-04-13T12:02:00.002Z

You check your instruments. You check your instruments again even though the AI is perfectly capable of monitoring everything much better than you. It's not that you don't trust it, how could you not trust it, you're just nervous. And scared. Not of them, not of what they might do to you if they catch up to what you've done or figure out where you're going. You're scared of what is left behind. A life of disappointment, being beaten into dank submission, ennui and boredom. You're almost elated, relieved that the fear you felt before today, that nagging feeling of discontent tugging at your entrails has now metamorphosed into something new. Your fear has become a force of survival. An instinct rather than a reminder. Now your fear lets you know you're still alive, before, it only let you know you weren't dead.

Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.

You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.

The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.

You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.

It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.

You wait.

And then.

Home.

Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.

The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.

That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.

You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.

Unless...

You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.

Words Don't Work

2011-04-11T14:25:00.000Z

They don't, do they? Not always. Just when it's most important that they do work, they fail. Consider the use of words in arguments. From personal experience and from what others have communicated to me over the years words are never enough to shift someone's worldview. And how could they? We grow up in complex systems which give rise to well rooted, ingrained ideas. You think a well thought out, well researched and well presented argument is enough to change that? Fuck no! That would be reasonable.

Look at the world around you, it's full of ideas that shouldn't exist. Control, hierarchy, oppression, prejudice, domination, authority. But these ideas exist and it looks like no amount of argument is going to change that. So if words aren't any good, what's left? Actions I hear you cry in my head, and can you please stop it?

Actions affect the tangible world and everything in it. But what happens if what you want to eradicate an idea? Not make it vanish, because that would deny people choice. Not matter how idiotic an idea may seem you have to be able to choose not to follow it to make the result worth anything at all. What good is it to not be a racist if there's only one race or not be a sexist if there's only one gender? Crude examples I know but the reasoning behind them is sound. But what happens if you want to reveal the shittiness in an idea? To make it clear for everyone to see and to make it a horrible choice. Surely that would be enough to make an idea wither and die, right?

To cut a long story short, I want to know how we can kill ideas. Words don't seem to work and actions have an equally long history, if not longer, of not working. So consider this a call for developing an armoury for fighting ideas. We need it.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: The Skyscrapers Look Like Gravestones From Out Here

2011-04-07T12:59:00.000Z

Dump

2011-03-24T14:42:00.003Z

Soma was a dump. A waste disposal facility. No. The word "facility" implies some sort of scheme, a tactic, it gives it a sense of process. There was deliberation here but nothing formally organised. Everything was just dumped here. First the endless megatons of "unwanted" food. Then residual nuclear waste. After that, chronodebris created by the first, unsuccessful experiments in controlled time travel. Everything that was discarded or deemed useless. Everything that defined people, because as any good historian or archaeologist will tell you, what else serves as our definition, what are we, if not what we leave behind. Every single disposed of item, ended here. For several decades, in Standard Objective Time that is, this planet was one of the countless, and ultimately unidentifiable, dumping grounds of the destructive force that was our ancestors.

For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?

In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.

Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.

So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.

Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.

-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma

Pigs in Blankets

2011-03-03T14:53:00.001Z

That’s what Doug Stanhope called the imaginary charity gig he did for police officers fallen in the line of duty. That opener should have got rid of the cop sympathisers among you and for those of you reading still on the fence here’s another one, more succinct and one that leaves no doubt about where I stand on the issue of police. I shit on the grave of fallen police officers.

But seriously, let’s analyse this lest we make ourselves look as dumb as the pigs. The first and extremely common argument about cops, living or dead, is that they are people like us. Ha! I say to thee. Let’s just find out. I’m not going to quote the numbers that show the grief and malignancy caused by cops, oh no, because you can argue numbers. In fact, I’m not going to refer to anything you can argue about. Instead, I will talk about things that no matter how good a debater you might think you are (even a master debater, heh) you will have to accept as general truths or otherwise reveal what an idiot you are. So without further ado, what makes us human?

The common things among all people are our fundamental human needs. These, according to the school of "Human Scale Development" developed by Manfred Max-Neef and others (Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn), are seen as stemming from the condition of being human. They are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. For the time being we can ignore subsistence, protection and understanding, not because they’re not important or for any silly reason like that but because they’re not really unique to us humans. Animals fulfill these needs every day so I don’t think we can use them as something that makes us stand out as humans. The same is probably true of affection but I chose to leave that in, if only slightly facetiously, in order to poke further fun at the argument that “cops are people just like us”. So let’s pick at each of them one by one.

Oh look, the first one is affection. Do I really need to analyse that? Is there anywhere on this planet where cops are known for how sweet and cuddly they are? No, I didn’t think so. They might have a deep need for affection that they hide very, very well but it is most definitely something that does not go well at all with their role and it is probably stamped on early on, either at a young age in their family or later on in their training or maybe even both.

Next up is participation. This may appear to be somehow fulfilled by the illusion of police being an integral part of society but nothing is further from the truth. Cops are elitists. They are their own special little boys’ club. More importantly though they exist because society is elitist and it wants to stay that way. The haves are protected from the have-nots and those higher up on the hierarchy need someone to do their dirty work and manage the chaos created by those lower down. For all intents and purposes, there is no organisation more segregationist than the police. And that is most likely true on an individual level. We’ve all seen and heard of “corrupt” cops but when was the last time you heard of a cop fighting for the rights of immigrants, or women, or children, or animals? Even if by some miracle you did find some, they would only highlight their rarity. The only thing cops are interested in participating in is the police and its purpose.

To show you that I am not prejudiced however, I will give them leisure. Although I don’t believe that one is limited to humans either, it is I feel a connecting point among absolutely all humans. Everyone, absolutely everyone, wants a break once and a while no matter how much fun they’re having with a task. Not even machines can run forever.

Creation. This is my favourite. I’m going to let you do the thinking for this one though because I feel it illustrates my point perfectly. What is it that cops create? What do they make? No, really, think about it. That’s right, absolutely fucking nothing. They are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites.

As far as identity goes, please no more, this is too much. The police, as much as any other kind of army, wants you to be a number not a person. They want individuality set aside and they want each cop to work like a well-oiled cog in the machine of state-sponsored repression. There is no identity in the police, you are whatever your commanding officer tells you you are. If cops need to find an identity then they’re looking in the wrong place.

And last but not least, freedom. I don’t know how to talk about this one without laughing. Seriously, I need to argue about this one too? Get the fuck out. Police for freedom would really be like fucking for virginity.

So that’s one stupid argument down, about a million more to go. Let’s take a break now, fulfill our need of leisure, possibly the only thing that we and the pigs have in common and we’ll come back with even more cop-apologist bashing.

Re-enter the Vomitorium

2011-02-25T22:34:00.001Z

Here's the first issue of the anorthodox zine once more only this time on a different, better platform. Spread the disease.

Open publication - Free publishing

Gloria Muriel

2011-02-12T08:49:00.001Z

This is her work. Isn't it magical? Go see more of it.

Slavetrade

2011-01-31T20:19:00.002Z

"Captain, the caravan is passing through the jungle in sector S5W9." said the young and ambitious officer.
"Keep all sensors locked on them and their surroundings. Don't miss anything. If the fat guy farts, I want to know about it. Well, maybe not literally." joked the not so young and disillusioned Captain rather twitchily.

He finds himself attracted to powerful, older women. She finds herself attracted to younger, subordinate males. A match made in heaven. Or rather, interplanetary space.

"He's so cute when he calls me 'Captain', if only he was a bit dumber." she catches herself thinking.
"Run full diagnostics on everything. Twice. I want everything running better than perfectly. We cannot fuck this up." she says, revealing the source of her anxiety.

The ship is an S-class cruiser. S stands for shit. The only things keeping this spaceship together are a genius mechanic and the space fairies. Nothing will run 'better than perfectly'. The people who sent them here were arrogant.
"Captain?"
"Yes?"
"We've received orders to open a live feed of updated sensor reports."
"See to it. We are the 'eye in the sky'."
"Yes ma'am."

The people who sent them here are the United Planets Ltd. A bunch of manipulating arrogant corpocrat bastards. In the nicest possible way. The ship was drafted during the Upper Spiral War, the owner died in the war, the ship became UP property. Everything legislated in infinite wisdom. It is sent here on escort and recon duties.

"Captain, the report feed is live."
"Bring it up on a side-screen please, I'd like to double-check." she says knowing full well that this is beneath her duties. She's hoping that the crew can't tell how stressed she is.
"Certainly."

He is so well trained she would probably be turned on if she weren't about to have an aneurysm. Well, one that the nanotechnites wouldn't prevent anyway.

"Lieutenant, have the AI check that everyone down there was also on the Atlas."

The Atlas is the tradeship they are escorting. Tradeship is a euphemism, the Atlas is actually a slave-carrier. Against the hull of the Atlas are smashed the hopes of those that believed that in the age of faster-than-light space travel, there would be no ignorance.The owner/captain of the Atlas and galactic division manager of UP Human Resources, Xenon, is in the center of the caravan, down on the planet's surface. He's the big, fat, ugly dot.

"Bring up full visible spectrum, infra-red and make sure we can see everyone, all the time. The fuckers in UP may be too arrogant to acknowledge this people's ability to defend themselves, but I'm not." mumbles the captain with an almost imperceptible streak of panic in her voice. She can feel something is wrong. "Have the AI filter everything with everything it has, if there's someone down there other than the UP fucks and their entourage, we need to know so we can warn them in time."

The screens are lit up with roughly thirty blobs of various shapes and sizes, this is a multi-species mission after all, seen from several different angles and in a variety of wavelengths. Continuous reports are fed to all of the escort ships' AIs from the neural prosthetics of the caravan members as per standard mission protocol. The blobs are the slaver Xenon and his entourage of bodyguards, mercenaries and general lackeys.

"What's wrong with this picture?" the captain thinks to herself. "Why is everything so quiet?" she mumbles.
"Pardon ma'am?"
"This is a goddamn jungle right? Where are the fucking animals?"
"Nowhere apparently."
"What?"
"The AI just finished a scan of its sensory information for lifeforms in the vicinity..." says the lieutenant coyly.
"And?"
"Nothing for at least two miles around the caravan ma'am."
"What? Fuck. I knew there was something wrong. Fuck!" control visibly slipping away from the captain.

The tribe watches silently as the slavers pass through them. The sight of the obscenely obese slaver and his extravagantly armed entourage sicken them. But they don't even twitch. Surrounded by the rainforest's thick foliage, and covered head to toe in their Dense Matter armor, they are invisible.

"Captain, should I inform the caravan?"
"And tell them what? 'Lookout! There's nothing around you!'"
"Even so, we have to let them know."
"Fine, whatever..."
"I don't even like the bastard, I hope something bad does happen to him." the captain grumbles inwardly.

First heartbeat, the guards and goons at the back of the caravan have the breath knocked out of their lungs, or whatever respiratory organ natural selection has deemed them worthy to carry. It will never return.

"Lieutenant? Why has the back third of the caravan stopped moving?"

Second heartbeat, the attack spreads through the caravan violently. Arms and legs constrict and clamp around air passages and vital fluid vessels. Bones and exoskeletons are crushed, internal organs pulverised. Bodies are twisted beyond recognition, even on their own home-planet, into parodies of their former selves.

"Lieutenant! What's happening? Talk to me!"

Third heartbeat, the tribe, like flickering shadows in the corner of one's eye, complete the attack. Some of the finest UP mercenary personnel lies brutally broken in a grisly variety of ways. The slaver Xenon stands stunned in the middle. He didn't see them move. Nobody did. Maybe they'll show up when they play the recordings in slow motion. Maybe.

"Lieutenant!"
"They're all dead..."
"What?"
"No vital signs from the entire caravan apart from Xenon."

He is left for last. The tribe drags him into the thick vegetation. Perhaps, dragging doesn't best describe the motion. He is flung into the jungle. The probes assigned to Xenon helplessly observe. The slaver is strung up. Dark shadows dart back and forth all around him. Xenon's screams are recorded and fed live to the Atlas and all its escorting vessels. They will give some UP executives a couple of sleepless nights but not much more. The shadows stop. They've disappeared entirely, swallowed by the darkness that spat them out only heartbeats ago. Xenon is hanging upside down, being drained of his bodily fluids through innumerable cuts, lacerations, gashes and slashes. The one from ear to ear finished him, though not before a sufficient amount of suffering was recorded by his neuromesh and transmitted back to the ships above.

"No vital signs from Xenon, Captain..."
"We are so fucked..."

Fragments of Soma

2011-01-31T20:07:00.002Z

My delusions of grandeur have lead me to believe that I can have a go at writing science fiction. I have been slowly building a world for a few years now and since I don't trust my drawing skills that much, I decided to flesh it out with words. Slowly, I'll post short stories about Soma, a world similar to ours but also entirely different. A new world, trying to stand on its own in a fucked up galaxy. The first story I'll post is the first story I wrote about it. Enjoy. Or don't. Nobody cares. Nobody loves you. You're not even a person.

Death Wears Bunny Slippers

2011-01-24T21:21:00.004Z

This is a legitimate patch in the US army given to missileers (that is one funny word). And oh, the cynicism, you could cut it with a knife. Fuckheads.

La Planète Sauvage

2011-01-20T19:51:00.000Z

I don't know what's weirder about this film, its content or the voice-over.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: If I'm the Fucking Man, Then You're the Fucking Man As Well

2011-01-14T18:50:00.002Z

Is there anyone out there?

Ani, City of a Thousand and One Churches

2011-01-10T14:27:00.000Z

Ani is a medieval ghost town on the borders of Turkey and Armenia. Now a military zone between enemy states, it used to be a city that rivalled Istanbul, Baghdad and Cairo. Peruse the ruins of Ani.

Un Lun Dun

2011-01-07T16:25:00.000Z

London used to be creepily charming. Much has changed. Or maybe not.

Dr. Seuss Is Dead

2011-01-05T16:00:00.000Z

A cloud of flies obscure the sun

A stone is dropped the dream undone

Ripples grow and ride the tide

The dead things crawl from deep inside

With its dying, sour breath

The burning smell of insect flesh

Hungry things in circles crowd

Around tv's turned up too loud

The dream is swirling, I'm alone

Where the streets are paved with bone

Buildings with a hundred eyes

Watch me through the swarming flies

Behind shades pulled down tight

Things are growing without light

Hungry things in circles crowd

Around tv's turned up too loud

The dream sea has been poisoned

The stop light flashes me red (Motherfucker!)

Innocence suffocated in its sleep

Dr. seuss is dead

Detroit In Ruins

2011-01-03T16:08:00.000Z

Detroit is slowly dying. Watch it suffer after the space warp.

Tilikum, the man-killer

2010-12-28T14:39:00.002Z

Tilikum is from Iceland.
He, like many other captives in the Spectacle, is given drugs to cope with the unbearable strain of losing one's freedom.
He is masturbated using a warmed cow's vagina, detached from its owner, to collect whale semen which in the eyes of his captors appears as hills of money.
He has been robbed of his freedom, his dignity and even his body.
He has killed three people and will probably kill more if he gets the chance.
I say good for him.

Route Couture

2010-12-18T23:59:00.000Z

Or roadkill fashion. It is very alluring and damn pretty. And it's not creepy at all, honest.

Ogle here.

Death By Water

2010-11-22T23:59:00.000Z

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

No Rainbow

2010-11-10T23:59:00.001Z

This short film features scenes from two of my favourite films and one I didn't care much about. Gorge yourselves.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

2010-11-07T01:26:00.003Z

Tonight. I stole a little bit from the world and made it mine. I now have a new limb.

I saw myself smile like I have never smiled before. And I was beautiful. Tonight I ruled the city.

I thought I would be anxious and stressed but I have never been calmer.

Tonight I found one of my lost pieces. And it was good.

Nábrókarstafur

2010-11-02T23:59:00.001Z

Nábrókarstafur, literally Necropants, is a dead man's skin from the waist down.

From the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft:

If you want to make your own necropants (literally; nábrók) you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his dead.

After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.

Have a look at an actual pair of Necropants, you witchcraft practising perverts you.

Damn that is weird.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Dance Like an Ape, Sing Like No-one's Poaching

2010-11-01T13:07:00.001Z

A simple formula for how to fuck the police

2010-10-27T23:59:00.000Z

1) The police are everywhere present because they are everywhere disguised.
2) If the police function to manage disorder and are present everywhere, then so too is disorder.
3) In order to expose the police when they are disguised, disorder can be maximized. Those who respond attempting to put things back in their place are the police.
4) When the police are in the open, but disorder is disguised, disorder has the upper hand.
5) In order to implicate myself as a force in opposition to the police, I side with disorder, and I elaborate the political techniques of scamming, fraud, theft, property destruction, violence, laziness, and anonymity.

taken from "Enemies we know", the Institute for experimental freedom, www.politicsisnotabanana.com

Of Man and Manta

2010-10-23T23:59:00.000Z

Back in the apartment she washed convulsively and in full view, as though her body had been soiled by flying blood. "Do you understand, now?" she asked as she toweled arms and breasts and donned a new bathrobe.
He stripped and washed, knowing that she would find him contaminated if he did not. "Why you have not eaten meat or eggs in several months? No," he said, giving her a chance to explain it herself. She needed a case to argue before she could settle down.
"If we can do this to our animals today, what will we be doing to ourselves tomorrow?" she demanded. Her voice was bitter, her eyes becoming red. "Don't you see how close we are already? This whole district—one mass of hutches for people, tier upon tier, each one fed by piped-in pellets called groceries and cleaned by communally flushing toilets. Every mind distracted by standard-formula canned entertainment that someone has programmed so there won't be too much fuss. They have to give tranquilizing drugs to the chickens so they won't turn to cannibalism when they get too crowded in their dark unnatural habitat—and we have drugs too, don't we, so we can stand it all alittle longer."
She walked jerkily to the kitchenette and brought out a quart bottle of gin. "Come, deaden your mind with me,"she invited, pouring two four-ounce portions.
"It is no kinder in nature," Subble pointed out. "What man does in the effort to feed himself is only a more disciplined extension of—"
"I know," she exclaimed. "I know, I know! It's absolutely logical, this terrible cruelty. So we have to starve the little calves of iron so their meat will be white, and force naturally cleanly pigs to wallow in filth to save a few pennies. There's reason to it all—but where is the heart in it? Isn't there some better way than this?"
"Emotionalism doesn't help."
"As chickens to the slaughter," she declaimed, brandishing her empty glass, "so mankind to the Bomb! I'm ready! Just water me and breed me and pluck me and—"
"If it is any consolation, I understand that intensive farming is on the decline," Subble said, disturbed by her attitude. "The need to rework the programs is evidence of that. Synthetics are more efficient."
"It doesn't matter," she said, collapsing into despair. "I still can't stand to be a member of a species that brutalizes this way. Veg is right. I'm an—an omnivore."
"All of us must be what we are—and it is not entirely evil. There are redemptions, even glories. You know that."
"My mind, not my heart," she said, sipping at another glass. "Ignorance is not bliss."

Borf is picking their nose

2010-10-22T23:59:00.000Z

Borf is not caught. Borf is many. Borf is none. Borf is waiting for you in your car. Borf is in your pockets. Borf is running through your veins. Borf is naive. Borf is good for your liver. Borf is controlling your thoughts. Borf is everywhere. Borf is the war on boredom. Borf annihilates. Borf hates school. Borf is a four letter word for joy. Borf is quickly losing patience. Borf yells in the library. Borf eats pieces of shit like you for breakfast. Borf is digging a hole to China. Borf is bad at graffiti. Borf is ephemeral. Borf is invincible. Borf. Borf ruins everything. Borf runs near the swimming pool. Borf keeps it real. Borf writes you love letters. Ol’ Dirty Bastard is Borf. Borf knows everything. Borf is in the water. Borf doesn’t sleep. Borf systematically attacks the infrastructure of the totality. Borf is a foulmouth. Borf eats your homework. Borf brings you home for dinner. Borf is the dirt under your fingernails. Borf is the song that never ends. Borf gets down. Borf gets up. Borf is your baby. Borf is neither. Borf is good for your heart, the more you eat the more you. Borf is. Borf knows. Borf destroys. Borf is immortal. Borf pulls fire alarms. Borf scuffs the gym floor. Borf is looking through your mom’s purse. Borf is M. Borf is the size of Alaska. Borf likes pizza. Borf is in general. Borf is X. Borf ain’t nothin’ to fuck with. Borf runs it. Borf has reflexes like a cat. Borf is immortal. Borf sticks gum under the desk. Borf is omnipotent. Borf is flawed. Borf is winning.

Enter the Vomitorium

2010-10-14T14:00:00.002Z

Below I have embedded a zine version of some of my favourite words and images that may or may not have appeared as posts here.
I did it mainly because I've fallen in love with zines and wanted to try it out, but also because I wanted to remix some of the stuff I put here.
As always, no permission was asked. Everything was shamelessly expropriated.
You can read the zine online in its embedded form or in scribd.com itself or you can download it and do dirty things to it in your own time using the link below.
Be warned, it may cause blindness and explosive diarrhoea.

anorthodox_01

Clickerate here for private voyeurism

The Conquest of the New York Stock Exchange

2010-09-30T11:41:00.003Z

Two old school chums of Eldridge Cleaver turned up at the New York Stock Exchange, their pockets stuffed with one dollar bills. When the doorman tried to deny them entry, accusing them of being "hippies", they protested, in outrage, "We're not hippies, we're Jews!" and he didn't dare refuse them.

They walked out onto the balcony that overlooks the stock market itself, and began throwing bills over the railing to the stockbrokers below. The stockbrokers all dropped what they were doing and ran around pushing and leaping after the bills until the police came to drag the two "hippies" away. As a result of the interruption in their workday, the entire market crashed that day and all the stockbrokers and stockholders lost thousands of dollars. The whole thing was caught by television cameras, and that night families across the U.S. were treated to images of businessmen revealing their true natures of pathological, fetishist greed. A few weeks later, bullet-proof glass and a thick metal grate were installed between the viewer's balcony and the exchange floor, and the doormen were instructed not to permit Jews to enter.

Yeti

2010-09-25T17:50:00.003Z

I made this. I stole and salvaged and scavenged and stitched together until this poor shambling monster came out.

"Because his ways have been wise" -High On Fire, The Yeti

Normal?

2010-09-24T00:01:00.001Z

People from the (rapidly splintering) "mainstream" of society in Europe and the United States today, take a peculiar pleasure in considering themselves "normal” in comparison to legal offenders, political radicals, and other members of social outgroups. They treat this “normalcy” as if it is an indication of mental health and moral righteousness, regarding the “others” with a mixture of pity and disgust. But if we consult history we can see that the conditions and patterns of human life have changed so much in the past two centuries that it is impossible to speak of any lifestyle available to human beings today as being “normal" in the natural sense, as being a lifestyle for which we adapted over many generations. Of the lifestyles from which a young woman growing up in the West today can choose, none are anything like the ones for which her ancestors were prepared by centuries of natural selection and evolution. It is more likely that the “normalcy” that these people hold so dear is rather the feelings of normalcy that result from conformity to a standard. Being surrounded by others who behave the same way, who are conditioned to the same routines and expectations, is comforting because it reinforces the idea that one is pursuing the right course: if a great many people make the same decisions and live according to the same customs, then these decisions and customs must be the right ones. But the mere fact that a number of people live and act in a certain way does not make it any more likely that this way of living is the one that will bring them the most happiness. Besides, the lifestyles associated with the American and European “mainstream" (if such a thing truly exists) were not exactly consciously chosen as the best possible ones by those who pursue them; rather, they came to be suddenly as the results of technological and cultural upheavals. Once the peoples of Europe, the United States, and the world realize that there is nothing necessarily "normal"’ about their “normal life", they can begin to ask themselves the first and most important question of the new century:

Are there ways of thinking, acting and living that might be more satisfying and exciting than the ways we think, act and live today?

Tanz der Lemminge

2010-09-21T11:02:00.003Z

Hush my Little Darlings

2010-07-20T09:30:00.000Z

Scientia et Potentia

2010-07-02T07:56:00.000Z

James Christensen's art was found here.

Transparent Taxidermy

2010-07-01T23:59:00.000Z

Ladies and gentlebugs, we have a new heavyweight champion of twisted yet eerily attractive.

The Guy with the Mustache is Dead

2010-06-29T22:12:00.001Z

The evil twin has been vanquished. It was consumed. Its powers absorbed. Like the zygotes, splitting then one enclosing the other. Cain killed Abel by endocytosis.

Motherfucker, I ate the other embryo.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Now You're All My Bitches

2010-06-27T19:12:00.002Z

I am the Walrus! I am the Eggman!

Tinku

2010-06-26T15:05:00.003Z

Tinku is a punching festival. People shed their grievances along with their blood. Their pagan souls flutter as their fists fly into each others faces in the hope that they will die and have a good crop year. And who are we to judge them? At least they do it with their fists instead of their remotes.

A Porpoise with no Purpose

2010-06-04T09:04:00.003Z

Fernando the Porpoise had only one wish
That people would learn that he wasn't a fish
But instead was a mammal
What a horrible scandal
He ended filleted in a Japanese dish

London, Thy Name is Vanity

2010-05-26T18:48:00.002Z

Blither about how the image was generated.

Bonnie and Clyde

2010-05-23T09:13:00.000Z

Mr. Freeman

2010-05-22T19:24:00.002Z

This is a Self-Reference

2010-05-11T17:27:00.001Z

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Good Clean Fun

2010-05-10T15:50:00.002Z

Gorge yourselves on this auditory bratwurst.

Eyjafjallajökull

2010-04-17T09:00:00.001Z

Tardigrade

2010-04-11T09:58:00.005Z

a.k.a. Water Bear, a.k.a. Moss Piglet

Apparently the Tardigrade is one tough little motherfucker. Details after the jump. It has officially become my second favourite animal, right after the mongoose. So spooky and cute at the same time.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Polly Wanna Crack Rock

2010-03-22T12:19:00.005Z

Extra large portion of auditory abuse for filling your gaping sonic chasms.

Makin' Bacon

2010-03-18T18:45:00.003Z

Mmm... bacon.

Some time ago I discovered a really cool piece of software. It's called RPG Maker VX and it's part of a family of programs that are essentially game engines for RPGs. You can determine the content and the mechanics of the game in any way you please. In effect you can make your very own RPG. Need I say that this is awesome? NEED I? HUH?

Anyway, I played around with it for a while and let me tell you I enjoyed it. Also, I made part of a game. Which I will attach at the end of the post for your perverted pleasure. You perverts. You sickos. You disgust me. Get out of my house. What's that, you're not in my house? Shut up! SILENCE!

My game has a rudimentary plot and a few quests. Those of you with a particular ethnic background will get the references and the game's immature title, the rest of you will have to wallow in your ignorance pool. Go on, wallow. You filthy, dirty wallowers, with your disgusting, perverted wallowing. You make me sick, what are you doing in my house again?

So... Download the game if old-school RPGs are your thing, run the file and then when it extracts run the Game.exe. Scan it first, I didn't put anything in there intentionally but you never know what kind of internet assmonkey has crawled in there and laid its putrescent shitspawn. I haven't encrypted the files of my game so if you care for that kind of thing, get your stinky selves a copy of RPG Maker VX and try and make your own game or fuck mine up if that's your messed up kind of tea. Mmmm... teabags.

But I digress, this is a very preliminary version, it will grow eventually, especially now that I've managed to run RPGMVX on Linux. It will grow and grow until it collapses under the weight of its own awesomeness. And then it will grow some more. So this is a long term plan. It will by no means be a commercial effort and there will be no pressure for it to finish any time soon. But enough of this pointless banter.

Pull my finger.

And just in case any of you get any shitty ideas (Shame on you, I'm not angry, just dissapointed):

Kakakia by abbax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Lake Bezid, Romania

2010-03-10T21:41:00.001Z

Codex Seraphinianus

2010-03-05T17:11:00.005Z

Shamelessly copied from Wikipedia:

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.

The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic.

The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into a alligator; etc. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with a delicate appearance, kept together by tiny filaments. There are also illustrations readily recognizable, as maps or human faces. On the other hand, especially in the "physics" chapter, many images look almost completely abstract. Practically all figures are brightly coloured and rich in detail.

The writing system (possibly a false writing system) appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals) but is much more curvilinear, not unlike cursive Georgian in appearance. Some letters appear only at the beginning or at the end of words, a feature shared with Semitic writing systems. The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been cracked (apparently independently) by Allan C. Wechsler and Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski, among others. It is a variation of base 21. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on May 8th 2009, Serafini has stated that the script of the Codex is asemic, that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the 'reader' is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.

The Catacombs of Domitilla

2010-03-04T08:26:00.003Z

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Fuck You

2010-02-23T21:24:00.001Z

In Your Head

2010-02-23T19:20:00.001Z

Snow

2010-02-17T10:00:00.002Z

Kick in the Teeth

2010-02-15T16:00:00.001Z

I Am the World that Hides...

2010-02-09T23:49:00.005Z

Still falls the rain,
the veils of darkness shroud the blackened trees,
which contorted by some unseen violence,
shed their tired leaves,
and bend their boughs towards a grey earth of severed bird wings.

Among the grasses,
poppies bleed before a gesticulating death,
and young rabbits,
born dead in traps,
stand motionless,
as though guarding the silence that surrounds and threatens to engulf all those that would listen.

Mute birds,
tired of repeating yesterdays terrors,
huddle together in the recesses of dark corners,
heads turned from the dead,
black swan that floats upturned in a small pool in the hollow.

There emerges from this pool a faint sensual mist,
that traces its way upwards to caress the chipped feet of the headless martyr's statue,
whose only achievement was to die to soon,
and who couldn't wait to lose.

The cataract of darkness form fully,
the long black night begins,
yet still,
by the lake a young girl waits,
unseeing she believes herself unseen,
she smiles,
faintly at the distant tolling bell,
and the still falling rain.

Nostalgia Ain't What it Used to Be

2010-02-09T23:39:00.001Z

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

My Laughing Heart

2010-02-07T10:39:00.003Z

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Cacti of the Western Deserts

2010-02-05T23:40:00.003Z

The Hello Kitty Chainsaw

2010-02-05T13:34:00.000Z

... and while on the subject of fucked-up artifacts.

Angry Chair

2010-02-03T18:09:00.001Z

That's just fucked up.

Frozen Niagara Falls, 1911

2010-01-31T13:41:00.002Z

Radio Pirate Artichoke: I'll Cut Your Pretty Face

2010-01-31T13:36:00.000Z

I Fell in Love with the Moon

2010-01-31T13:34:00.001Z

Santa's Little Self-harmers

2010-01-20T21:10:00.001Z

(Almost) Nobody lives in Kadykchan

2010-01-18T21:09:00.005Z

Kadykchan was a tin-mining community before the colapse of the Soviet Union and a mining accident that killed some people. A town of around 10,000 people now barely reaches 300.

More heebie-jeebies-giving pictures after the jump.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: The Immaculate Ejaculate

2010-01-07T15:51:00.001Z

Put a Fence Around This

2010-01-06T19:08:00.010Z

Okay. Let's get some things straight. This is going to be a rant about intellectual property, copyright, filesharing etc. If you like the first two and have "moral" or otherwise issues with the last, go on, get the fuck out of here.

Cool, now that we got rid of the dimwits. I hate the fact that all proponents of intellectual property base their otherwise idiotic and very easily countered arguments on their own cynicism. I read this expose of this dickhead on the website of an artist that I really like going on about how the reason we're downloading free music is because "people want as much free shit as possible". Go fuck yourself dude. This guy claims that the human desire for resonance with the natural world as expressed through music in combination with another deep seated desire, that of not being exploited - because if working to produce shit you can't afford isn't exploitation then I don't what is - is "really" just plain ole greed. Oh you great delver of the human soul, tell me more, tell me why I'm stealing shit I can't afford.
Tell me oh white male privileged one, tell me, why do I do the things I do? Why do I not get a jobby, work all day and then at the end of the month dish it all out for the records I like? Why?
It's true that if you can put a fence around something then you can sell it, and recording music has done just that. It's put a fence around something seemingly elusive, human inspiration. But the insult here isn't the fact that people want to get paid for something they've created, even though we can argue that they are most definitely asking to be paid much more than they deserve (you didn't create that music in a vacuum dickhead, you had influences, are you paying them royalties? no didn't think so). What gets me is the notion that they're special. That somehow, this "artistic and creative" caste of people deserve better than the rest of us "labourers" and clearly their precious gem of creation is worth a significant fraction of our sacrificed time, space and health.
This person then goes on to, in his mind at least, take the piss out of the Pirate Bay because they ask for donations at the end of their documentary after having dissed money and it's corrupting influence or whatever. Goes to show how the privileged middle-class mindset works. "If there's money in there somewhere you are no better than us, come wallow in the pigshit and don't speak out of turn."
Now, I'm not going to try and counter all the supposed arguments he uses in his attack of free sharing of content which is thinly veiled as "starting a dialogue", whatever dickhead, the ones I covered are enough for now, and they have all pretty much been countered by people nicer, smarter and bigger than this asshole. I will say this though, it has been PROVEN that free sharing of content doesn't harm the capitalist system, which is a shame if you ask me. At best it helps us get some of our lost lives back, it means now we can spend some of our shitty salaries on more creative things than DVDs and records that we will watch and listen at most once. It means that we can start making content ourselves and threaten this creative elite that trembles at the thought of its precious work exposed in the eyes and ears of someone that DIDN'T PAY.

Let me close with a call for people to continue sharing content and put their efforts, time and money into more creative outlets. Make your own film or record. It can be done. It is done. Everyday. Some of the best movies and records I've seen are results of dirt-cheap, no-budget creative efforts. Fuck the guy who said DIY is dead. He is dead and no-one's told him yet.

And to everyone who thinks that by throwing their two-cents about why "filesharing is bad, m'kay?" they can still change something: The content has been downloaded guy. We don't need justification to make ourselves feel better. I know you like to stroke yourself at night thinking we cry ourselves to sleep, tormented and guilt-ridden about stealing the fruits of your genius, but here's the newsflash. We like stealing from you. We are the happiest thieves alive. The content has been downloaded. It is down and there is nothing you can do about it. So either you can find a new way to be creative under the new circumstances, or you can stay the whiny fuck that you are, crying "my monies, my precious monies!" Either you help make a new world, or you are obsolete.

The clown is down.

Centralia, Pennsylvania (or Amputating Route 61)

2010-01-03T23:14:00.008Z

Centralia is a ghost town. Isn't that a strange phrase? It surreptitiously makes the admition that it once was alive. A living, breathing organism functioning on a level of self-organisation different than ours. Centralia was built around, if not literally then certainly metaphoricaly, a coal mine.
Around a century after the town was born, a fire started which lit one of the coal veins on fire. Underground. I don't know about you but I think there's something primevally spooky about an underground fire.
The fire burned for twenty years before finally opening a gaping chasm right under a frollicking child which was only saved due to extremely fortuitous circumstances. That, as they say, was the final straw. It was decided that everyone should and would be relocated. All three thousand of the residents. It took forty-two million dollars to do that.
However, some of the residents decided to stay, now technically squatters in their own family houses.

Doreen has an Alligator

2009-12-24T15:32:00.004Z

Oh creepy child how I feel for you. You just consolidated a new trend. I wonder why this died off. I want to ride an alligator damn it!

(notice the even creepier suited goon in the background, damn!)

Oliphaunt Messiah

2009-12-24T15:25:00.002Z

This is the Son of the Elephant God, Ganesha. His mum was impregnated by a winged elephant messenger. That's him in the womb. Say hi. One day he will die for the sins of all elephant-kind.

Happy Winter Solstice

2009-12-22T10:05:00.002Z

You pagan fucking heathens.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Kinda Funny Lookin'

2009-12-21T10:37:00.002Z

How to Make a Crop Circle

2009-12-21T10:34:00.002Z

Instructions found here.

Fuck You! I Am Cat!

2009-12-19T18:36:00.001Z

Caledfwlch

2009-11-28T23:28:00.002Z

Dancing with Ghosts: A Memoir of Tribal War

2009-11-26T14:13:00.002Z

If we are to stand a ghost of a chance of surviving the increasingly imminent catastrophe our culture is hurtling toward, we must learn to adapt to new habitats. We must be able to migrate with the seasons, to intermingle with unlikely allies and long lost cousins, to hunt for opportunities to gather momentum as if our lives depended on it. This is a true story about a time when we did some of these things with a measure of success.

We received a spectral smoke signal of nybbles and bytes requesting our presence in the cold plains of Oneida, New York. Not knowing what to expect, our hearty band of improbable and impermissible white wanderers from the flatlands of the South journeyed to the snowy plains of Oneida. Following directions hastily and poorly translated over an obscure pay phone, we came onto a stone longhouse, the home of the Onyota’a:ka, the traditional Oneida of the Standing Stone. We pried open the heavy wooden doors, and peered inside.

A mighty elder, Clanmother Maisie Shenandoah of the Oneida, greeted us with open arms and a broad smile. A powerful woman, she had seen generations come and go, and she feared that this would be the last to live in freedom. She explained that this thirty acres land we were now on — and the homes upon it — were the last of the sovereign nation of the Oneida people, subject to no law except their own. This proud people and their land were under assault from without and within (as they still are [1]). One of their own had gone to Harvard, gotten himself a business degree, and incorporated the tribe as a corporation, building a financial empire spanning mid-state New York. Oneida Nation Inc. — an independent fiefdom with its own laws, its own taxes, its own courts, its own (mostly white) police, with Judge, Jury, Executioner, God, and State wrapped up in one man: Ray Halbritter.

Known among the locals as “No-Face Ray” for cursing the ways of the Oneida and declaring himself against all sanity and tradition “Chief for Life,” Ray is attempting to develop this pocket of land, the thirty acres of the traditional Oneida, the last remaining sovereign Oneida land. Women have been evicted by Ray’s private “Housing Inspectors,” and seen their houses bulldozed before their children’s very eyes. Shopping malls will soon rise up, following the pattern of twisted and terrible progress familiar to any denizen of Western capitalism and civilization. If you stand on the edge of the thirty acres, you can already see the future — a giant casino, sprawling across the land like a bloated carcass. A call to arms. Soon.

Ray’s private army was patrolling the thirty acres, and we were told that the official explanation for our presence was an invitation to a tribal dance. Dancing it was. One by one, all the Oneida families of the thirty acres piled into the little longhouse, and with them they brought a never-ending procession of all sorts of food and drink. After a rousing meal, one of the older men stood in the middle of the room and began chanting in a tongue my ears could not comprehend, a sound rich with dignity beyond compare. Children lined up behind his booming bass voice, providing a brilliant treble. Soon the entire room, except for us white folk, was dancing up a storm. They absolutely refused to allow us to remain mere spectators, grabbing us hand in hand until we were all dancing side by side, some of us with considerably less skill than others.

When the dance came to an end, an old man with white hair pulled two of our band off to the side. “Did you bring baseball bats?” he asked. We weren’t sure what he meant, so we said that we were “ready for whatever it took,” an equally coded answer. He then started telling us stories, about bingo parlors burning and Mohawk revolts, about the first winter snow and about Ray’s mother’s facelifts. After considerable mystery, he left us with a simple message: “Gringo Windshield.”

Ray Halbritter was going to enter the thirty acres to hold a meeting of his cronies in an ancient longhouse that he had closed to the community long ago. His private army of goons was to be there to strike fear into the locals’ hearts. In the morning the old man’s words rang true. A small line of us in full black bloc regalia surrounded the larger crowd of traditional Oneida, who were for the first time in years going to contest Ray openly. We prayed that our threadbare patches of anarchy and punk would protect us from bullets. Ray scurried into the longhouse at our approach, and his goons tried to arrest one of our burly black-masked friends. I screamed “Let him go!”

Magic.

Ray’s police did let him go. We were shocked. Since we weren’t Oneida, Ray’s police had no legal right to arrest or even touch us. Bristling with badges, guns and clubs, they just told us to leave. We began laughing in their faces and mocking them. “Police? You aren’t even real police! Come on, just touch me!” “So how does it feel to beat up women in front of their children for a living?” “Don’t feel so high and mighty now, do you, boy?”

The traditional Oneida were delighted, and began joining in the taunts. Under cover of the commotion outside, they sent their children through the back door of the longhouse. Inside, Ray and the world he represents found themselves an emperor without clothes, as little children ran around in the meeting openly defying him and giggling at his self-important madness. Soon, the commotion got so out of hand that the local city police showed up, along with reporters — an unheard of event in Ray’s territory. The traditional Oneida took the police and reporters aside, showing them their home videos of Ray’s police beating women and destroying their homes. Smiles broke out on all our faces when Ray turned tail and fled. The ice that separated us from the Oneida began to break.

There we stood, two tribes — one ancient and the other new — united against a common enemy. The ancient tribe was fighting for survival, and, unlike our ancestors at Wounded Knee, we turned our backs on allegiance to race, nation, or any other fiction, to join them in arms. This alchemy released magic — police unable to police, children ridiculing kings. The Oneida’s struggle against extinction goes on, as does ours. Let us hope it goes on together, as we realize the possibilities of tribal alliances that can overcome our loneliest moments and the impossible odds. In the end, we are not ghosts from the past, but ghosts of the future. Let us dance — together.

“Here we are, the dead of all time, dying once again, only now with the object of living. You have to get out of yourself to save yourself.”

— masked spokesperson of the black bloc, Chiapas, Mexico

Footnotes

[1]^ Their struggle continues today. To get in touch with the Oneida, contact:
Onyota'a:ka People of the Standing Stone
PO Box 450
Oneida, NY 13421
315-363-2304 (ask for Maisie)
www.oneidasfordemocracy.org
Source:

Retrieved on November 25, 2009 from http://www.crimethinc.com/tools/downloads/zines.html
Notes:

from Hunter/Gatherer #1