#zak smith

[justineportraits]

Zak Smith Girl in the Naked Girl Business, Charlotte Stokely 2012

[the-toy-boy]

[a-rogue-tiddy-bot]

After reading about Zak Smith's well-documented history of bigotry and sexual assault, I don't believe I'll be buying vtmb2.

[aeontriad]

Zak Smith

[vortexstreet]

Zak Smith, V in the Corner with Rabbit, 2002, Acrylic and ink on plastic coated paper, 40 x 29 in. (101.6 x 73.7 cm)

[fuckyeahthomaspynchon]

Is cyberpunk a sentient light bulb? - A review of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. – Neon Dystopia

Thomas Pynchon is widely regarded as one of the most influential of American novelists. Famously secretive, little is known of his whereabouts, save from two memorable cameos in The Simpsons. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is his magnum opus and is often quoted as a major influence on cyberpunk. Author Richard Kadrey and scholar Larry McCaffery go as far as claiming that Pynchon’s novel is “the best cyberpunk ever written by a guy who didn’t even know he was writing it” (Storming the Reality Studio, 1991, p.21). Gravity’s Rainbow tells the story of World War II German rocket scientists launching an experimental device oddly numbered “00000”, of Allies’ intelligence officers trying to predict the impact point of the Reich’s V2 rockets, and the hunt for the lost 00000 by everyone in the aftermath of the war. But what exactly is hidden in the Schwartzgerät, the mysterious plastic container embedded in the “00000”? Could it be that the German engineers have harnessed the mysteries of life and death? That is the most intelligible summary I can possibly come up with. What is left out is utter lunacy, a demolition derby run by horny clowns. If you can picture a crossover between Moby Dick, Naked Lunch and The Big Lebowski, you’re not far off. A more courageous summary can be found here. Like any Pynchon work, Gravity’s Rainbow will appeal to “motivated readers”. It’s not an easy ride, filled with foreign words, hard science theories, impossibly named characters, and a complex narrative structure taking the reader from WWII to dodo bird hunting in the 17th century for no obvious reason. Every other sentence is full of obscure trivia, and engaging existential fits are stopped short when the characters suddenly break into stupid songs, fornicate, or afflict each other with tasteless practical jokes. And kazoos. Boy, that is a lot of kazoos for a single novel. Devo’s classic synth-punk anthem “Whip It” was inspired by the songs found in Gravity’s Rainbow. The relations between S/M sexuality and the cult of productivity is also an important theme of the novel. Some might be offended by the sheer fun Pynchon takes at characterizing male sexuality in relation with weapons of mass destruction, and by the objectification of women throughout the book. But that’s the point: Gravity’s Rainbow is pornographically obscene, self-complacent and overly pedantic, but its argument is about the irrepressible urge to fulfill desires, with no productive value and much waste. The book offers a cynical look at how men will fallaciously feel important while hysterically working toward their own annihilation (the object of desire, the serial number “00000”, is a symbolic void). In fact, one of the working titles was indeed Mindless Pleasures. And nobody, throughout the book, seems to really care about the outcome of the war. Analysis Gravity’s Rainbow may not be cyberpunk proper (Pynchon’s 2013 novel, Bleeding Edge, telling the story of hackers in pre-9/11 New York City, would better fit the bill), and its influence on the genre is not as palpable as some might claim. Still, the non-linear narrative and the all-out frenzy of Pynchon is reminiscent of early Gibson or of Rucker’s goofiness. Furthermore, along with the writings of Burroughs, the author’s defiant use of obscenities is a forerunner of a literary punk attitude. The most striking similitude, however, is in the way Pynchon shed light on otherwise obscure cultural relations between physical objects and mind patterns. The search for the landing site of the 00000 is also the quest to find absolute ground zero, the psycho-geographical point where natural life meets technological death. This book also brings some perspective to the question of transcendence in cyberpunk, the possibility of reaching something beyond our finite material state, whether that be meaning, immortality, consciousness, or God. There might not be transcendence in Pynchon’s writing, but this novel is nevertheless driven by the anxious search for one. In this regard, Gravity’s Rainbow acts as the missing link between hippie alternative mythology and cyberpunk disenchanted materialism. The A-bombs that put an end to WWII made the general public suspicious of science, but at the same time technology was making its way into households like never before. In this perspective Pynchon’s novel is the reflection of its time: fear for the loss of traditional identity and irrational reactions to the fast-changing state of the world. While Pynchon’s take on the subject is mostly a sarcastic commentary on the various hypothesis running in hippie culture (psychoanalysis, esoteric interpretations, sexual revolution, conspiracy theories, and so on), the main narrative plot is articulated around the dualism between the organic and the inorganic. The dodo’s extermination side-story is mirrored by another digression telling the story of a light bulb so well crafted, it becomes immortal and sentient (and sets to unionize the light bulb community – it fails). Oddly enough, this may be where Kadrey and McCaffery’s affirmation makes some sense. The organic death is transcended in some way by the pathetic immortality of machines. Cyberpunk derives from that, but modulate the conclusion: technological evolution may or may not be suicide, depending on the path followed, and transcendence may or may not be the issue. Consequently, cyberpunk rejects the 60’s New Age mythology and its quest for existential meaning, or at least not in the Platonic, all-encompassing sense prompted by the symbolism of Being/Sex/Death found in Gravity’s Rainbow. Cyberpunk seeks to establish a new organization to the otherwise entropic system, to find new relations in a world where technology changes everything. Transhumanism, for cyberpunks, is not the prerogative of mad men with grand schemes to achieve transcendence, but the only possible mode of existence in a reality that has most certainly rejected the idea of life after death in favor of materialism. By operating the fusion of the organic and inorganic in death, Pynchon opened the door for cyberpunks to hybridized men and machines in life. While Pynchon is mostly pessimistic about the results, the cyberpunk stance, if not optimistic, is at least more matter-of-fact oriented. As Sterling writes in the preface to Burning Chrome, cyberpunks are “bore[d] with the Apocalypse”. Things will go on. Gravity’s Rainbow is a tough sell. Anything said about this literary Behemoth is doomed to miss the point. It may not be the best novel I’ve ever read, but somehow it is beyond that. In a more general context I would wholeheartedly declare it a must-read, but from a cyberpunk point of view, given what the genre has become and what is expected from such a label, Gravity’s Rainbow does not provide action-driven escapism nor workable futurology. It is a gifted kid with ADHD lighting up fireworks in the sacred temple of literature, and amidst the chaos laying some philosophical ground to transhumanism and to the attitude of perceiving the reality as code to decipher. Gravity’s Rainbow : 6 / 10 If you would like to purchase a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, you can find it here. If you would like to purchase a copy of Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, you can find it here.

[artdepo]

rough art of Zak Smith

[dr-archeville]

Thanks to everyone for your patience as we deliberated on the situation that has unfolded regarding Zak Smith (aka Zak Sabbath). At DriveTh...

Thanks to everyone for your patience as we deliberated on the situation that has unfolded regarding Zak Smith (aka Zak Sabbath).  At DriveThruRPG, we want to do our part to keep bad actors out of the roleplaying community, and we don’t want business relationships with such people.  As such, you’d think there wouldn’t be much deliberation needed on our part.  However, the situation posed a number of challenges for us to consider in terms of precedent and collateral impact on other parties.

I have decided that we will not accept future titles for sale on DriveThruRPG (or our other marketplaces) if Zak is a contributor on the title.  If any publisher has a title-in-process to which Zak is a contributor and this policy would impact you financially, then we’d ask that you please reach out to us via the publisher services link to have a dialogue about that title.

For titles currently on our marketplace in which Zak is listed as a contributor, we have checked those publisher accounts, and none of these titles have us paying money directly to Zak.  While it is likely that Zak does earn a royalty on some titles sold on DriveThruRPG, any such royalties would be paid directly by the publisher of the title, not by DriveThruRPG. 

Further, whatever royalty Zak might get from any publisher on our store is unlikely to be the entirety of what we pay that publisher.  We do not feel it’s fair to penalize financially those who worked with Zak in the past, including both publishers and possibly other contributors earning income from these titles.  Therefore, we expect publishers to make their own decision to continue selling these titles or not, presumably after consulting with all other contributors. 

For our part, we will be identifying all titles to which Zak contributed and diverting all of the revenue shares that DriveThruRPG might make from sales of these titles as a donation to RAINN (https://www.rainn.org/).

I’ll try to pre-emptively answer other possible questions below.

When this happened, why did you not suspend sale of Zak’s titles while you deliberated? When we expect that it will take us a few days to deliberate on a title reported for offensive content, our policy is to temporarily suspend sales of that title.  In this case, though, it was not the content of any particular title under discussion, and we did not find any titles where we directly paid Zak for ongoing sales during our deliberation.

So DriveThruRPG is now banning certain creators?  Will whoever the “outrage brigade” complains about next be banned as well? We all share a responsibility for the health of our hobby.  Any demographic measure we’ve ever seen on the roleplaying hobby shows women are under-represented.  Things won’t improve if people shirk the responsibility to make our hobby inclusive.

Zak Smith has a long and well-documented history of behaviors antithetical to a healthy community.  In light of recent allegations, which we find credible, we think our business and our hobby is better off without him, so we’re doing our part.

We already have a small list of other bad actors in the industry with whom we refuse to do business: people who have repeatedly abused crowdfunding platforms for personal enrichment, who repeatedly engaged in IP violations, who have repeatedly treated our staff or customers in unacceptably unprofessional ways, and so on.  If you repeatedly act like a jerk (or worse, a predator), we won’t wait for other people to complain about you.  We’ll just quietly stop doing business with you. 

Why are you not banning his existing titles? Because we don’t want to hurt other people who also contributed to those same titles just to diminish Zak. Banning those existing titles risks doing just that. 

Thanks, Steve Wieck President OneBookShelf / DriveThruRPG

For those who’ve not heard, Zak Smith/Zak Sabbath’s ex-wife, Mandy Morbid, made a FB post laying out multiple instances of emotional & sexual abuse by Zak, including stories from other women associated with him, two days ago (Feb 10th) [01, 02, 03].  Since then, I’ve seen lots of posts on twitter from RPG industry professionals corroborating Zak’s awfulness.