What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. 

T.S. Eliot

 people have been abused and abandoned by the government. when people realize they still have the power, the oligarchs and war criminals better watch out.

 

hallelujah. i heard a yell and looked down and saw a man run across the street and another yell and a bang. the video downstairs showed a girl laying on the ground and being trundled into a truck. i don't freak out. maybe it's human nature, or maybe human nature is lost, i don't know. we live in the land of ultraviolence. everything here is normal. everything deadly is normalized. 

 

It's cold, it's like winter in America
Time when all the healers, brothers who have done been killed
And put them in jail, say
People know there's something wrong
Something wrong with winter
It feels like winter in America

The truth is there ain't nobody fighting because
Well nobody knows what to save
Yes and the truth is
There's nobody fighting, nobody fighting
Nobody knows, nobody knows what to do, what to do
The truth is there ain't nobody fighting because
Nobody knows what to save

Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson, 

Winter in America

 the war on terror is the hub of global and domestic terrorism. 

it's time to boycott the oligarchy! it's time for revolution! 

 

 cats for freedom. cats against empire. cats against genocide. cats for palestine.

 we watched the killing of a sacred deer last night. i'm sure i saw it before but i had no recollection of the scenes unfolding. it was as though i was seeing a dream i had buried deep in my unconscious gray matter. yorgos lanthrimos sure captures the strangeness and the violence of the humans. i think we will have to watch all of the films now because i imagine they comprise an alien world, the uncanny dreamscape of this one.

we heard an awful crash at 7:37 a.m. on friday january 3, 2025. olive was hiding under the world globe table with her popcorn box beside her, looking stricken. on further investigation it was revealed that the said olive knocked over and killed the sacred snake plant she had been seen molesting for several days running. yesterday i noted that she would kill the sacred snake plant, and the inevitable end has been accomplished. yet, while posing next to her victim, olive has the audacity to state unequivocally, "i don't know what happened. that wasn't me." 

the wind 

between

the trees 

cries

stop 

killing us

 what really hurts my heart and the heart of the world is what gets built and what gets buried by lies and propaganda and genocide.

 my mind goes back to eugene poke's in the basement of the film school in carbondale showing me his super 8 film of him saying over and over, i care only for aesthetics, in a droning monotone. unbearable yes, and it was only a few minutes long. my mind goes back to that a lot of times. today it went back after i read a review of the brutalist and heard from a friend that it was gorgeous. i'm not going to watch it. i wasn't going to watch it anyway but after reading about it on screen slate i'm boycotting it in solidarity with the palestinians, in gaza and beyond. i care for aesthetics, but a beautiful brutalist building on stolen ground is ugly. anything built on land seized by genocide is ugly as sin, no matter how aesthetic it looks. 

 

i can't see it anymore. i see it but my eyes glaze over. i just keep doing it for the record, but why. i just want it to end. it's like gaza, i glaze over. every red line is crossed, every evil is legalized and normalized.

 i mean to ask jay and robin about the brutalist today. i read about it on screen slate. i had a feeling it would not be anti-genocidal. the architects who fled nazi germany and settled in palestine built their buildings on palestinian land taken in the nakba of 1948.

 

Whatever power The Brutalist summons in its rags-to-perhaps-Zionism story is blunted by the unwillingness of its story to actually end where it leads. The film freely depicts the destruction of heroin addiction, the hidden cost of creative patronage, and how love is sustenance and wounds either heal or fester with time. But with Zionism, Corbet and Fastvold prove unable to even intimate the horrible truth to which it amounts: that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and even those further subject to American abuses of capitalist exploitation might be capable of perpetrating the same crimes against someone else.

Noah Kulwin, 

About the Destination: The Brutalist and Israel

we live in separate, overlapping realities.

is gaza an event horizon? what comes after the genocide? 

we are all trapped here. no way out. just sky. you die and you fly the sky. this is the only way out of gaza nowadays.  

-shrouq aila

 we watch paul mccartney and rick rubin talk music. olive sits high up on the bookshelf watching us watch and then comes down, drawn to the voices, the music, or rick's beard. it's beautiful to see and hear them talk. it's like an aural archeological dig into the beatle archive. we wanted it to continue. 

 mom talks about going home, but not urgently, not wondering when they will be released from the place. she calls it a country club. just to check on things, to see if the plants are taken care of, and if the storm damage from the last big storm has been repaired. she thinks of the house as a previous place that waits for their return, but not with great urgency. 

 If we have learned anything over the past year, let it be this: It’s either Gaza or fascism, Palestine or the end of the free world. As sure as the armed resistance refuses to die, its mantle taken up by successive generations of fighters, so too does our role on the cultural front endure, laying bare the contradictions in the discursive theaters of the imperial core. The road to liberation is long and hard, but it is necessary. So do not tire. Resolve to continue fighting for a free Palestine within our lifetimes. Because our cause is just and we will win.

WRITERS AGAINST THE WAR ON GAZA

 searching for olive's mouse under radiator.

 we all have to do the work. to walk the dog. to sacrifice everything that is fake within ourself.  

                                                                                                  -nina

 mars retrograde in cancer will show, something really needs to be resolved within. it goes back to childhood. time to detox, folks.

 things will not be as they seem. we're gonna have to face our illusions.

                                                                                              -darla

we must simplify our life.

 

 

listening to a talk about the coming time and black holes i thought of the recurrent dream i had as a kid of running along the crumbling edge of a chasm, unable to veer off to safe ground or fly over the abyss. i was afraid i would fall and die. i've written about this before but it's a new year 2025. i reckon the edge was like the event horizon, and the abyss was generative space. a cloud is just the sky condensed, a thought is just consciousness condensed. not knowing is potential condensed. the year is a soul-forging year. you don't have to avoid the void, give it a hug like a cat. 

 while the natural world collapses, the terror state expands.

 new years film of the day, surveilled. or maybe not. why do we want to know about things we have no say about and cannot change.