If I had to pick my own introduction to the genre of noise, it would be around 1992. We were skateboarding one night, and this kid that I kinda recognized from school rolled up with “FVG/\ZI” and the Crass logo spray painted on his grip tape. He had a mohawk and an army jacket, and a hell of a one-footed ollie. The next day, I went to the record store Noise Noise Noise and bought The Feeding of The 5000, and was hit by a 2-minute and 42-second dose of spoken word/noise called “asylum”.
In 1996, Victory Records released a split 7-inch with Integrity and Psywarfare, and two years later a split 7-inch with Integrity and Lockweld. I may not have totally understood the sounds at the time, but I accepted them.
By 2008, I was experimenting with making my own noise and shortly after, struck up a friendship with Dwid Hellion that has resulted in more productivity and encouragement around my creative endeavors than almost anyone in my life.
New studies reveal that people love to pirate TV and books, and that Americans outpace every other country when it comes to piracy.
The pandemic caused piracy to spike in 2020. According to a pair of reports from security researchers, 2021 was another growth year for online piracy. As first spotted by TorrentFreak, new reports from research groups Akamai and MUSO revealed that users visited pirate sites a total of 132 billion times in the first months of 2021, a 16% rise over the previous year.
Michael Haneke is one of the most unsettling directors out there – but not for the reasons you may think. So what makes his films so uncomfortable to watch, and why does he do it?
For the philosopher, our postfactual stimulus culture is one that edges out time-consuming values such as loyalty, ritual and commitment
The other day I accidentally dropped a silver art-deco teapot, which has been my constant companion for the past 20 years. The dent was huge, and so was the measure of my grief. I suffered sleepless nights until I found a silversmith who promised me she could fix it. Now I find myself waiting impatiently for its return, filled with dread that, when it arrives, it will no longer be the same. And yet the experience leaves me wondering: why have I unravelled in this way?
‘Things are points of stability in life,’ the South Korean-born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his new book, Undinge (Nonobjects), which is just out in German. (As is the way of things with philosophy books, English-language readers might need to wait some time for its appearance in translation). ‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ Han writes. Living matter and its history bestow on the object a presence, which activates its entire surroundings. Objects – especially well-designed, historically charged objects, and which are not necessarily artworks – can develop almost magical properties. Undinge is about the loss of this magic. ‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth. The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’
I enjoyed reading Xen: The Zen of the Other, but the audio radio play is even better. Its gusto voice acting, hypnotic musicscapes, and mystical plot all add up to a transporting experience that’s beyond what we normally expect from a book recording.
A man dressed in a Joker costume and brandishing a knife stabbed at least one passenger on a Tokyo commuter train before starting a fire, injuring passengers and sending people scrambling to escape and jumping from windows, police and witnesses said.
The Tokyo Fire Department said 17 passengers were injured, including three seriously. Not all of them were stabbed and most of the other injuries were not serious, the fire department said.
The attacker, whom police identified as 24-year-old Kyota Hattori, was arrested on the spot after Sunday’s attack and was being investigated on suspicion of attempted murder, the Tokyo metropolitan police department said Monday.
The attacker, riding an express train headed to Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, abruptly took out a knife and stabbed a seated passenger – a man in his 70s – in the right chest, police said. Injury details of other 16 passengers are still being investigated, police said.
Police said he told authorities that he wanted to kill people and get the death penalty. Nippon Television said he also said that he used an earlier train stabbing case as an example.
Witnesses told police that the attacker was wearing a bright outfit – a green shirt, a blue suit and a purple coat – like the Joker villain in Batman comics or someone going to a Halloween event, according to media reports.
A video posted by a witness on social media showed the suspect seated, with his leg crossed and smoking in one of the train cars, presumably after the attack.
Tokyo police officials said the attack happened inside the Keio train near the Kokuryo station.
Television footage showed a number of firefighters, police officials and paramedics rescuing the passengers, many of whom escaped through train windows. In one video, passengers were running from another car that was in flames.
NHK said the suspect, after stabbing passengers, poured a liquid resembling oil from a plastic bottle and set fire, which partially burned seats.
Shunsuke Kimura, who filmed the video, told NHK that he saw passengers desperately running and while he was trying to figure out what happened, he heard an explosive noise and saw smoke wafting. He also jumped from a window but fell on the platform and hurt his shoulder.
“Train doors were closed and we had no idea what was happening, and we jumped from the windows,” Kimura said. “It was horrifying.”
The attack was the second involving a knife on a Tokyo train in three months.
In August, the day before the Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony, a 36-year-old man stabbed 10 passengers on a commuter train in Tokyo in a random burst of violence. The suspect later told police that he wanted to attack women who looked happy.
While shooting deaths are rare in Japan, the country has had a series of high-profile knife killings in recent years.
In 2019, a man carrying two knives attacked a group of schoolgirls waiting at a bus stop just outside Tokyo, killing two people and injuring 17 before killing himself. In 2018, a man killed a passenger and injuring two others in a knife attack on a bullet train. In 2016, a former employee at a home for the disabled killed 19 people and injured more than 20.
Xen: The Zen of the Other is a work that follows one man as he attempts to find his way through the jumble of modernity that envelopes us all and threatens to strangle us in its “Tentacles Longer Than Night.”
Cast into a world where the liminal overlaps with the world of paranormal /philosophical speculations, Ezra Buckley struggles to keep his head above water long enough to pluck a jewel of wisdom from the crown of a forest spirit.
In a world devoid of rites of passage, Ezra finds himself on his own as he is confronted with the very real prospect of having a life-changing, Liminal experience in the woods of Big Sur, if he can survive it.
Is it even real?
Is it the legendary Watchers of Big Sur phenomena or something else?
Xen is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
credits
released October 29, 2021
Xen: The Zen of the Other
Written by Ezra Buckley. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s a real name or not.- thepsychopath.org
Background information by Cameron Whiteside, if that indeed is his real name.- whereiscameron.wtf
Produced by P. Emerson Williams- pemersonwilliams.wordpress.com
The voice of Joseph Matheny performed by himself- josephmatheny.com
The voice of Ezra Buckley performed by Chris Gabriel aka memeanalysis- memeanalysis.com
The voice of Ralph performed by P. Emerson Williams
The voice of Tiamat performed by Anna “Maiya” Young- www.godmonsters.com
The voice of Racoon 1 performed by Iskandar Sakut abn Mayu (aka Eian Orange of Z(enseider)Z)- eianorange.zenseiderz.org
The voice of Racoon 2 by performed Deb Petrochko – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
The voice of the waitperson performed Missy G – afieldofred.wordpress.com
The poems of Ezra Buckley read by Joseph Matheny
Xen: The Zen of the Other- Copyright 2021 Joseph Matheny
All Rights Reserved
The museum said it will eventually want its money back, but the artist, Jens Haaning, has no plans to acquiesce.
A Danish artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork.
Take the Money and Run is the name of the piece by artist Jens Haaning—as well as a rather straightforward description of it.
For its current exhibition, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, lent Haaning 534,000 kroner ($84,000). Per their written agreement, the artist would exhibit the banknotes themselves, effectively recreating a pair of artworks he made in 2007 and 2010 that represented the average annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane, respectively.
However, when the museum opened up the box containing Haaning’s piece, they found two empty frames. The banknotes were absent.
