• Archive: vault

Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis: The Quantified Life Is Not Worth Living

Nov 14

Acceler8or, August 2012

Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo determined to make it across New York City in the midst of traffic chaos caused by a presidential motorcade, to get a haircut, but not, as we will discover, any haircut.

Impeccably dressed, physically perfect, emotionally smooth, and despite a series of sexual encounters during this single day with beautiful female subordinates — Packer’s world, until today, is nothing but data.

There’s Just A Tiny Infection Between Any Of Us And Batshit Crazy

Nov 14

Acceler8or, May 2012

In an interview that St. Jude Milhon conducted with Richard Preston for Thresher, Preston dropped a bit of “knowledge” that has always stuck in my head.  In an interview dedicated to the possibilities for bioterror, Preston said, “Martin Hugh-Jones told me that his all-time favorite bioweapon is Brucella.  It’s a bacterium that gives you a subtle long-term brain infection that changes your personality for the worse. That happens after you’ve received antibiotics that don’t completely wipe out the Brucella in your brain but make you think you’re cured.  The organism makes you prone to irrational rages and it also confuses your judgment.  ‘And the best part of it,’ he said to me, ‘is that you don’t know you’re going mental! Imagine the effects of this on a group of generals and leaders trying to run a war!”

How The Pandrogyne Confounds Hir DNA: Interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Nov 13

Acceler8or, June 2011;  NeoFiles, 2003

“People will say, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body’… And I say, ‘I feel like I’m trapped in a body.’

While he’s best known as the musician who helped start both the industrial music and the acid house music subcultures, Genesis P-Orridge is foremost a hero of the post-punk counterculture, a true mutant, an experimental artist, and an androgyne (“I prefer pandrogyne where ‘p’ is for positive/power/potent/precious.”) If you don’t know about Mr P-Orridge’s oevre, you haven’t just missed a career, you’ve missed an entire dimension of hyperreality.

A Possible Introduction to the MONDO 2000 History Project

Nov 12

Brenda1

10 Zen Monkeys, June 2010

Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.