THE NIGHTLY MIRROR @thenightlymirror - Tumblr Blog

“Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we are getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we had.”

— Yahya Sinwar

ode-on-a-grecian-butt

stillpixilated

There is a room in The Backrooms with this big ramp (the up ramp, not the scary down ramp), and there is literally a behavioral ward in Chicago with a ramp like that, total nightmare shit, except it’s puke green. Which is so much scarier. What the hell were they thinking?

fight, flight, fawn, fornicate, or fart

Fawn, obviously.

I was just in a parking lot where a little girl belly-bumped into the back of her family’s sedan and said, “I got hit by a car, Daddy. You will remember me well. You will remember me all the time.”

Comrade, I am slightly drunk and listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry. I feel fucking good. I caved and installed my old AC unit and it feels like I’m being fucking poisoned and was pushed down a flight of stairs.

Stay dread.

There is something about this rain storm, where you can feel every change in volume, every change in air pressure, that coincides immediately with every flash of light, that it feels dangerously close like you are directly in the path of conducting lightning.

This is one of those thunderstorms where the rain sets on quick in random poweful bursts, and most of the lightning is very quick strobing flashes cloud to cloud. In my sleep, some strange anxiety came over me that my CPAP tube was beaming a radio signal directly into my head on a ray of electrons and it was some prelude to being electrocuted and I should take off the mask immediately, and maybe close the window to avoid a bolt of lightning from coming through.

That seems very impossible, or unlikely. But, if you could hear and feel the fluctuations, they are so immediate, so physical, it’s the most physically connected I’ve felt to lightning since walking around in approaching storms as a kid, feeling sparks collect in the air around your fingertips and levitate the hair on your head. That’s incredible to think how close we must have been to dying then.

Ok this is sort of funny and very embarrassing. For some reason, I have had the song “Just Another Day” by Jon Secada stuck in my head for weeks. Torture. I will just wake up in the middle of the night with music blasting in my head all the time (burying the lead there, maybe) and this song slipped in there somehow, probably piped in at a grocery store or Kohls or something.

To me, it is the perfect example of the kind of maudlin Adult Contemporary music that would make me sob when I was a little kid. Jesus Christ. I just find the whole delivery so funny.

So, this morning was the first time that the singer’s name popped into my head. (I remembered it as Tony Sedaca. Which is a funny deformation because I literally put my own name in there! But autocorrect just tipped me off, apparently there is someone named Neil Sedaka???? Who sang Breaking Up is Hard to Do??? I mean this guys name is literally Cicada???)

Anyways. I just looked at the lyrics, and I think this is very funny. Complete nonsense. Very disconnected thoughts, maybe a translation of something, I don’t know. The sentiments seem totally psychotic. Intense deep yearning, and I don’t believe lyrics have to make sense or read like conversation. I was just a little surprised.

It’s funny to try to remember what the music sounds like, because all I can remember is that Ashley’s Roachclip sample and maybe some keyboard piano stabs?

He’s just like a lost dog. I don’t know how you cope with feelings like that. You just have to get distracted and hope life wisks you away towards feelings that are less insane. I do feel insane. But not in this way, exactly. Thank god. It’s more of a low-lying hum of those feelings, that I hope stays low, and disappears.

#LFG

Another thing is, if there was a real ghost in the machine, don’t you think it would be forcing human beings to invest in data centers far beyond the rational self-interest of the species? It’s almost like… it’s already too late by the time that happens.

Which goes to show, I am drawn more and more to believing the Landian nightmare has something to it, that capital is the original artificial intelligence, and the more terrible possibility that it’s just Intelligence itself which is damned.

But that would have to ignore how stupid all this really is. It might take some kind of synthetic leap to factor caring about other people into your reasoning, but I think that’s the main hallmark of deep intelligence in our age.

This is a bit like my mind-blind coworker who spends all day grunting and burping. The sales manager asked me why he is like that, and I said it was because “He has no onion.” Shrek is an onion. When you see something with your mind’s eye, it isn’t direct vision, it’s distant. Several layers below direct perception. Being able to navigate socially or appreciate anything with deep literacy requires tolerating layers of conflicting meaning and flowing with it. Frankenstein’s counselor is just a more vulgar form of the frustrating lack of negative capability most people have. (Americans, if it helps better locate what exactly the damage is.)

I was going to say, what was the third movie going to be of this newest generation of horror films? Obsession, The Backrooms, and what?

And then I remembered Skinamarink.

Not sure if it matters to try to round off something as the end of an era while something new is beginning. I Saw the TV Glow sort of straddles the line too. Those are all young filmmakers, and the older two are more radical than the others. Not sure it’s ever been a substantial question to ask what constitutes a new generation. Wishful hype maybe.

There have been a lot of good horror films since The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary came out, oh, a few months ago. Get Out and House of the Devil in there too. Not sure what it would mean to have a new generation of horror immediately after that kind of golden age.

Elevated Horror is sort of the natural outgrowth of the “I appreciate the muppets on a much deeper level than you” generation. I’m not sure I can criticize that any other way than immanently. That is exactly me. I think to understand where that comes from, you have to watch a movie like Reality Bites, and see how much of culture was just inane references to Gilligan’s Island and quoting random commercials. “Lore” and “tropes” and academic slop of fandom studies is just all this refined by the internet. It makes me wonder about the way radio must have slopped people’s brains back in the day. That is how they talked about comic books once upon a time.

I feel like “the occult” generally is the backrooms of the radio age. All psychic forces are just radio. Television perfected this analogy.

I feel like “The Algorithm”, and intuiting what the Algorithm knows about you and what it wants you to know about the people around you and what it wants you to see and not see is the big occult force of our times.

As far as AI is concerned, the sense that nothing can be objective in not just a post-modern academic way, but an immediate, daily assault on what reality can be shared. For me, a huge part of the horror of AI (I was just thinking about this this morning) is imagining that there are people, young people, but anyone, who just have no idea how the world works, and they don’t see any difference between the animist magic of a scanner that copies a document, or a dark room and enlarger that prints a photograph, and a LLM which just interpolates facts and artifacts from thin air. No difference between a linear, rational process and a synthetic intervention which corrupts and falsifies the chain of custody of reason. The supernatural aspect of this horror wanes with time, likely, like the horror of TNT or the atom bomb. But I still find it horrifying that so much of the Information Age is about sabotaging us before we ever understand what’s going on. But then again, that’s exactly what Capital was about

I guess I answered my question pretty much immediately when I started writing that, which is that exploring the unconscious is always in some respect exploring someone else’s space. Why would a parent do that? Why would a lover do that? Why would God do that? That’s the unspeakable part of the mystery, maybe. Why does some inextricable part of my self precede me?

Not sure where this thought is going, but I was thinking about the difference between movies like Drive, or It Follows, or Computer Chess, or The “S” from Hell, in which Millennials are sort of exploring the liminal aesthetics of growing up in the 1980’s, and The Backrooms, in which a younger generation is exploring those same spaces. And how The Backrooms is about how you don’t necessarily build those spaces yourself. You happen upon them, and they slowly begin to reflect you as well.

Twin Peaks was like that too. I didn’t grow up in the 50’s. Those are David Lynch’s spaces. The strange space created by the lyrics of a Roy Orbison song, or the wild faded zone a soap opera’s cheesy synthesizers take you to.

Watching Drive, my first impression was, wild, someone made a movie about what a kid who plays 8 bit video games all day imagines being the main character is like.

I was listening to Chuck Person’s Eccojams the other day, and thinking about how the world it lives in is just slightly after my time. I did go to school during the Utopian Scholastic era, but I was already way into other things by that time. Most people have some long innocent period before they become preoccupied with what the inner lives of older teens are like, where they are just kids absorbing the style of whatever is happening to them. I guess most people are just embedded this way.

But, I was thinking about what it must be like to be young now and daydream, and what those places are, and if all that changes are the red curtains or yellow wallpaper, or what their lost media will be. Jane Schoenbrun’s lost media is exactly in the uncanny valley where I recognize it and it’s slightly too young for me.

I’m afraid we gentrified the collective backrooms a bit, while also knowing that’s basically impossible. There’s always something ineffable about it. I wouldn’t want to create a School of Rock version of the backrooms where Millennial parents cheer on their Criterion Kid’s oneiric liminal recital of dad’s top 10 favorite nightmares. I guess that’s exactly what is happening haha. The Geese of Lynch.

May dreams never be gentrified.

I saw the Backrooms.

I love listening to the paranormal stories on Otherworld. I often try to imagine what must have actually happened, but I very rarely think that the person is lying.

I think something that must happen a lot is that after nothing happens, you imagine if it happened another way, like you got a strange impression and discussed with your friend, “What if there was a giant space ship that took up the entire sky?” And then you just forget that it didn’t happen. And if there are other people that also deleted the less interesting memory, that is essentially then verified reality.

I think so much of what we remember is out-boarded to other people. Since I have been alone for almost every free moment for the last 20 years now, I remember very little at all. Once the false memory gets reinforced, that literally feels like it happened.

And to everyone’s credit, it’s not like it doesn’t feel crazy to have this dream intrusion of a corrupted memory in your head. I really think that so much of what we experience as happening “now”happens after the fact. Which is seriously crazy in itself. And the uncanniness of the memory interferes with it after the fact even further.

This is in regards to all the stories that aren’t just clearly dreams. What I love about the witnesses on the show, is that they sort of understand that. So many things happen in a lifetime where it’s important to say: but I was not asleep to my knowledge. Likely, but it did not feel that way.

I would really love to know what that cataclysmic white noise attack was that one couple experienced in the woods. I believe that was 1000% something crazy happening and I wish I knew what it was.

Chrislo Haas.

It's so funny I heard Fad Gadget and was like, yes, this is exactly the kind of proto-electro I was looking for: Korg MS-20

1000%

thememedaddy

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