Oli Johns

X()-id </3 and Galaxies in and around Shing Mun River

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Yes, X()-id </3 is the title of the book by Ami J. Sanghvi, who did this piece on Harold & Kumar for film dada a while back.

From what I’ve read so far of X()-id </3, the formatting and tone is quite similar, only this one is [according to the cover] the 1st pataphysical study of the 5th Dimension & we who inhabit it.

Pataphysics = the science of imaginary solutions, a parody.

I’ll try and tackle this in a de-con-struc later, probably using pataphysics as a vessel.

The other book, Galaxies, is one I scraped against in KRV, but now I’m back to give it another chance cos it is sci-fi pretending to be literature pretending to be sci-fi and I should like that kind of thing.

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[Trash F-Log] Death Spa

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A haunted spa, Ken Foree dressed as Ali Baba, a blind[ed] woman forced to suck off asparagus.

Can’t say that Death Spa is good, I only managed eight minutes of it cos the dubbing was in Portuguese. But according to redlettermedia, the plot is nonsensical. The ghost of the dead wife is controlling the spa computer system yet most of the deaths are unrelated to that system.

Tiles flying out of the wall?

Maybe the ghost is using a combination of computer-possession + telekinesis?

Doesn’t sound that nonsensical to me.

But then I haven’t watched it.

Note: some of the pics are taken from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which I have seen, and fits quite smoothly into the mechanics of Death Spa.

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[De-Con-Struc] The Second Dream // Madelaine Culver

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Text: The Second Dream

Author: Madelaine Culver

Publisher: Steel Incisors

Plot: The blackness from Under The Skin sublimates out from its Scottish void to investigate the novelette form and something called Asemic writing that looks suspiciously like Arabic.

Subplot: Seduced and abandoned, the First Dream wanders the streets of Nowhere City, getting into fights with homeless people and scribbling Urdu on the subway walls.

Sub-subplot: The Masculine disguises itself as an elderly crone and ventures into the forest with a basket of plastic apples, one of them coated in green shit. But Snow White is not at home that day. She’s in the mines, whistling.

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To start with, The Second Dream is an [ekphratic?] response to the watching of the 2013 film, Under the Skin, which I have yet to see. I’ve tried to find it online but all I got was various pornography and a 90’s thing called Alien Agenda: Under the Skin, which I may try and watch at some point, but not now, cos I’m still trying to find the real Under the Skin.

Dailymotion?

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After more exhaustive searching, I’ve decided to just watch clips on YouTube and a recap by one of those channels that reads the wiki summary of the film out loud like a between-murders sociopath.

I hope it’s enough.

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[Trash F-Log] Hologram Man

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Hologram Man or Digital Man.

I guess one is the American title, the other is for the international market, but I’m not sure which is which and don’t care enough to look it up.

Got about 40 minutes into this film before giving up and switching to the redlettermedia botw video instead. It filled in most of the gaps, and made me glad I didn’t continue. A latex suit to put over the hologram, sculpted by a scientist who could perfectly mimic stubble?

Slash Gallagher is a fantastic name for the villain though.

As for the piece I’ve written, it’s a story with another story on top, the superimposed one trying to become a murderer of the one beneath.

Just like Hologram Man and the latex suit human body.

The idea of higher text murdering lower text isn’t actually new to me, I did something similar in a long-form work called Deeper Red that I finished a while back, that I can hopefully place somewhere at some point, that I’ll probably end up putting up on here as a PDF.

Submitting to presses is a humiliation that keeps humiliating me consistently.

Whereas Psycho Holosuite almost never says no.

Okay, enough pathos, it’s time for Hologram Man.

My piece below, not the film.

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Quake/Moss Piglet Zine In And Around To Kwa Wan

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Raining a lot here, pretty bored, found an old copy of ‘Quake’ and 2 issues of Melbourne-born ‘Moss Piglet’ zine under floorboards [next to Keith Allen + cash], inserted them seamlessly into pics I took a few years ago in To Kwa Wan and Yau Ma Tei and here they are with the last pic ‘Quake’ covering up the tattooed half of my face.

[Note: I don’t know if ‘Moss Piglet’ is still active, but it should be, it had a nice blend of sci-fi and surrealism].

Now time to go off somewhere dark and write about ‘Hologram Man.’

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[De-Con-Struc] Serious Weakness // Porpentine Charity Heartscape

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Text: Serious Weakness

Author: Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Publisher: Insul Press

Plot: A self-diagnosed weakling-stroke-art conservator, Trianon, cultivates new layers of ecstatic/traumatic weakness when taken captive by a sociopathic vandal, Insul, with lovely beach house and multi-purpose tennis racket.

Subplot: A museum director faces her first real test after years of Krav Maga and boxercise.

Sub-subplot: The art world is rocked by a series of authentic/violent things happening way out on the fringes of its sealed-off misery dome.

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According to the more pedantic side of my psyche, the title Serious Weakness is either:

i] genuine self-recrimination

ii] reflection on self-recrimination + desire to fix it

iii] transgressive dive into said ‘serious weakness’

iv] ironic self-description

v] ironic twin description [of the two main characters, Trianon and Insul]

vi] outright lie, there is no weakness

vii] blank self-description

viii] blank self-description of total personality/psyche

ix] personification of weakness in human shell

x] abstract dragged from abstraction into human shell + forced to deal with things that to them, as a newly formed thing, feel serious

xi] someone called Weakness who is serious

xii] someone called Weakness who is never serious

xiii] alien MC whose name translates to ‘Weakness’ crashes in the US, in a town called Serious.

Looking at the cover pic, I’m gonna go with x], but there’s green blood sliding out of the nose so it could also be xiii].

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I know about this book cos of the author’s story, Relative Time Knife, on Tragickal. This weird, barely-fleshed out, ambiguous but aggressive thing that had pain beggars and torture millionaires. Written by someone with a not bland name.

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[Trash F-Log] Alienator

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An android hunter from outer space is about to create Hell on Earth!

So says the blurb.

What actually happens is a rebel leader about to be executed is rebranded as a sadistic psycho then escapes to a forest in New Jersey [maybe] and gets run over by four teens. Meanwhile, sadistic prison warden/hero, Jan Michael Vincent, calls up the android hunter from outer space to pursue him and, consequently, create Hell in that little forest section of Earth.

Never have I seen an actor as drunk as the Airwolf guy. It’s painful to listen to him speak.

The film itself is solid.

To be honest I’ve only watched the first 15 minutes of it.

It probably isn’t solid.

But it does have some interesting things to not say about intersubjectivity, and the re-territorialisation of the rebel leader in the context of the four teens i.e. injured stranger.

At least it does in my head.

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[De-Con-Struc] You With Your Memory Are Dead // Gary J. Shipley

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Text: You With Your Memory Are Dead

Author: Gary J. Shipley

Publisher: Inside the Castle

Plot: The shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of two weeks inside the looping guts of Begotten.

Subplot: The observer of the shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of the hundred and eleven hours they spend continuously reading and/or writing about the text of the shadow of an ape.

Sub-subplot: Trapped in a state of infinite usage-stroke-exhaustion, ‘feels like’ and ‘I don’t know’ join forces with a jaded ‘or does it’ to find a way out.

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You With Your Memory Are Dead [YWYMAD from this point on] opens with the following quote card:

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‘Like a flame burning aw-     the darkness

Life is flesh on bone co-    ulsing above the ground’

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The two hyphenated words in the middle are interrupted by the tightness of the inner spine fold. I didn’t know, or didn’t remember, that Begotten opens [not ‘opened’, it’s eternal] with the same quote when I started reading so I tried to fill in the [anti-] spaces. These were my notes:

‘aw’ is either ‘away’, ‘awash’, ‘awful’, ‘awol’, ‘awkward’, ‘awkwafina’, ‘awe’ or ‘aws console.’

‘co-     ulsing’ must be ‘convulsing.’

Why the tight inner spine?

Accident, or an attempt to make this unconvincingly unfamiliar?

You think you know Begotten…

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The preface, written by the director of Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, tells us that Gary’s plan was to make the film his own by sitting in a room for two weeks and watching it on loop.

A bit random to drag this in, but it reminds me of Orwell and his stipend whenever things got a little too tough. He did work the dish-washing jobs he said he did, but he was never in danger of being poor. I mean, can you ever truly be absorbed into a thing that is not innately inherently you?

I wouldn’t do the Begotten plan, even with something I adore, e.g. DS9, so it is definitely a feat of endurance.

Parameters?

The only breaks allowed, according to the preface, were for meals and sleep, and, I assume, trips to the toilet.

Is that accurate?

Did Gary’s eyes have to stay on Begotten at all times?

Could they look at the wall nearby?

Would a fainter version of Begotten be playing there too?

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