Reestablishing Connection, Attempt 1/x

I see I haven't posted here in over a year (my last post was a discussion of Fantasy back in June 2019, which I've referenced to in several Twitter discussions since then).

I occasionally update my Instagram feed with photos I feel are passably interesting. Tumbler gets updated from time to time, both automatically (via Instagram reshare) and manually (back in October, most "recently").

I could retire this blog entirely, as I've generally stopped doing regular casual media criticism. Most of my current production is Poetry. This has been true since 2017 -- I've been persistently exercising this skill, picking up occasional publications in online literary outlets, and becoming more involved with the online poetry community.

The Twitter poetry scene seems to be the most productive. Established personalities join the discourse with more emergent authors and publications, and it's used broadly for discussion and announcements, both poetry-related and adjacent thereto. For a more consistent window into my sparse attempts to social engagement, visit me there at @miksimum.

Before we leave the topic of poetry, I'll post my most recent placements. For the full list, see my Publications page on my website.

February 2020:

Downtown Office as Abscess in Juke Joint Magazine

Being a Thing in the Fall in Neologism Poetry Journal

April 2020

2 poems in 3 Moon Magazine, vol. 1 issue 3

July 2020

Foot Bridge as Bowstring in Bodega Magazine

Forthcoming

3 poems in Praxis Magazine Online

Recently, I've been trying to prime my engine for visual art, returning to photography and pen/ink drawing. As compared with poetry, these don't have as obvious a career path for amateur enthusiasts like myself. I'll be posting sketches and photos (often heavily treated) on Instagram, but I don't have a lot of hope that I'm going to successfully connect with some kind of alt/art community that fits my style and skill level just right. I want to be more serious than a fairweather comics/fan-art dabbler, but I don't have the training or time investment of the excellent concept or semi-professional artists I see out there.

Even so, I'm still inspired by, and toward, certain forms of visual art, so if you want to keep track of that, follow me on Instagram or Tumblr -- always @miksimum.

Tonight I will be doing something. Maybe I'll watch the not-so-well-received Dark Tower movie, which I just acquired in Very Cheap Blu-Ray form. Maybe I'll keep reading something I picked up at my family's old farmhouse, the Robert Graves autobiography "Goodbye to All That." Maybe I'll write another poem in my drafts notebook.

Maybe I'll even get around to writing about it.

Later!

On BioShock Infinite: The Self, The Shadow, The Other

I did an analysis of BioShock Infinite, the recent FPS-cum-art-game from Ken Levine at Irrational Games. It can be found over at Berfrois, an always-excellent repository of essays and criticism. If you've played the gaem, or you're curious and don't mind spoilers, go give it a read. A selection:

On a thematic level, BioShock Infinite‘s tropes may be well-worn – it taps into familiar material – but it does reconfigure and invigorate these tropes, delving deeper into them than a work of art has attempted in a long time. These motifs, as articulated by psychology and existentialism, are the Shadow and the Other. They’ve been used in video games forever, generally in the shallowest of ways, but in BioShock Infinite, they’re resuscitated and supercharged, and their primal power gives an uncanny intensity to those aforementioned emotional moments.

On *Mein Blog*: My favorite album

Back in May, I wrote a reflection on my favorite album for Evan's blog. I chose the Rx Bandits' The Resignation. If you want to give it a read, here it is. A selection:

So here's what came together to make Resignation the album that it was: the Bandits had found some success in experimentation, so they decided to really push their creative boundaries. At the same time, they discovered a dense pocket of rage and frustration that their neo-ska-punk groove hadn't been able to relieve. So all at once, they exploded, both technically and emotionally, and the result is a really intense record, an angsty grit-toothed white noise at the confluence of all their circumstances and influences. It was a bit of a perfect storm of an album.

My Capsule Review of Like Someone in Love

Back in March, I did a capsule for Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love for 366 Weird Movies. If you're curious about the film, feel free to go check it out. A selection:

One of the great things about Like Someone in Love is how it demonstrates the strength of this kind of ambiguous, minimalist filmmaking: within its naturalistic treatment of its subjects, it creates huge fertile spaces for the proliferation of symbolic meanings and psychological resonance. It’s shot painstakingly, with the camera always intensely aware of its space. Doorways, reflections, confined interiors, obstructions, and the space outside the frame: all these become Kiarostami’s playthings. In his control of objects and the camera’s eye, he is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick, whose style was similarly deliberate, ostensibly naturalistic, but profoundly self-aware.

On Berfrois: The Death of Romance in The Shadow of the Colossus

A piece I wrote on the video game The Shadow of the Colossus has appeared on Berfrois, one of my favorite online magazine for lovers of criticism and literature, in all its digital and analog forms. I should probably be embarrassed about how much time and investment I put into this essay, which ended up being about 5,000 words; it took a lot of reading and a lot of craftwork to get it into its current state. Needless to say, I learned a great deal, and every time I think about it, I love the game I was writing about a little more.

Here's a quick excerpt from the meat of it:

Shadow of the Colossus is not the only story to draw on the Promethean myth. It has been repeated many times, by many authors, its metaphor relevant to many circumstances. Among them, Albert Camus and Lewis Hyde, both of whom I'll get to later. We should take note right now, though, that the myth of Prometheus undergoes drastic revisions in Shadow of the Colossus, which only contains a few traces of its original spirit. These Promethean Colossi may be chained to their territories, but they aren't being punished for stealing fire. Here, they are protectors, guardians of some kind of dark essence, which enters Wander's body each time he slays one. They are not the enemies of order, but its enforcers, and Wander is the true transgressor, destroying the matrix of stability that keeps the Forbidden Land in check.

-- The Death of Romance in the Shadow of the Colossus, on Berfrois.com

Love on the Inside : Jesse on Punk in the 90's

Berfrois published another of my written pieces, this time on punk in the 1990's. It even got retweeted by Fat Mike of NOFX (@FatMike_Of_NOFX), who called it a "Decent big worded essay." Here's part of the intro:

"Why should I want to write about the 90s? The world of music history, written by the consummate insiders at Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, seems to have concluded that punk happened in 1977, and that it left an aftertaste in the 80s, but had “died” by the time New Wave hit. Why write about the 90s in punk, the decade of fallout after the bomb had dropped and the dust had settled? Here’s why: that was my decade, and it happened. Punk was alive, and it was changing, and it was a centerpiece in all our lives, and it deserves to be remembered, fondly and harshly and nostalgically and in all its bitter glory. Those were my years. Why the fuck shouldn’t I write about it?"

From Love on the Inside / Our Own Shit Decade

The Poisonous Image in Wisconsin Death Trip

This was a while back, but 366 Weird Movies published another piece of mine, on an obscure documentary called Wisconsin Death Trip. It's a pretty cool, out-there kind of movie.

Frank Cooper’s account of Black River Falls, above, may be little more than a publicity blurb, but in Marsh’s film, it represents something much larger. It is an image of the town and an image of small-town life as a whole, an idyllic fiction created and taken as a faithful reflection by those who identify with it. It is a broad meta-narrative, a reassuring script – a framework to give larger meaning to many small lives and arbitrary circumstances. This is a category of “image” that Mitchell barely touched upon… the reflexive mental image called a self-image, which gives identity to both the individual and (by custom and consensus) the collective. Unfortunately, as the citizens of Wisconsin discovered in the late 1800′s, this self-image is a fragile thing, a glass castle on a precarious perch, and its destruction can be catastrophic.

-- The Poisonous Image in Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 366 Weird Movies

The Three Fetishes: An Essay on Return to Oz (1985)

(from a new essay of mine, entitled The Three Fetishes: Transformation and Ethical Engagement in Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985)):

Both Mombi and the Wheelers are deconstructed human types, but it’s worth noting the difference in their strategies. The Wheelers are mechanical constructs, almost steampunk in their primitive morphology. Mombi, on the other hand, is cybernetic. She is a highly adaptive system with interchangeable identities, wearing faces and demeanors like it’s a matter of fashion. She is more dynamic than the Wheelers, but also more fragmented, with seams and couplings that penetrate right into her soul.

In what seems like somebody’s terrible delegation decision, Mombi has been placed in charge of guarding some very important things. One of them is a substance called Magic Powder, fairy dust gathered into a vial, that gives life to anything it’s applied to. She keeps this powder locked up with her original head; why she has it, why she values it, and what she might ever do with it are all mysteries that won’t be answered by this narrative. In no time at all, Dorothy will steal it and use it to animate a new companion (the Gump). Though it doesn’t have much more of a role to play, the powder is a symbolic cornerstone within the text. Honestly, Oz might as well be made of the stuff.

-- from the essay, which can be found at the excellent blog 366 Weird Movies. I've been writing a bit for outside outlets, and I'm going to continue doing that for a while; I'll keep posting selections on here, so feel free to click through, if this is how you keep up with my ramblings.

Digital Disquiet: How 8- and 16-bit games taught me the power of dread

(in case you missed it when I tweeted it all over the place a couple weeks ago)

"For those who grew up with them, those late 1980s/early-1990s golden-age console and PC games can represent a great many things. They can still evoke long-lost affective states, emotive chords that have never been struck by any other medium. I’m an avid reader and a part-time cinephile, but books and movies have never done to me what Castlevania and many of its 8- and 16-bit peers did. There is a special sense of dread and anticipation, a special experience of the sublime, that belongs uniquely to those games, and that will be forever captured in my earliest memories like a solution in a jar, waiting to be occasionally stirred up by a passing remark, a news story, or a train ride.

That sense of dread is unique to those particular video games, that unrepeatable phase of gaming history that lingered for a few years and then vanished into the slipstream of forward progress. Within a decade, that style of gameplay was entirely lost, crowded out by cinematics and back-story and sensationalism. I’m glad I got to live it at that receptive stage of my life, because it’s not coming back."

- from my essay, published in Berfrois on June 1, 2012