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caltropspress · 2 years ago

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FIELD NOTES STRAIGHT FROM THE GLUMS OF NEW JERUZALEM: Fatboi Sharif + noface's Preaching In Havana

[I played the Preaching In Havana cassette on a Panasonic Portable AM/FM Stereo Boombox Model #RX-F9 (manufacturing date circa 1988) at nine predetermined locations around the state of New Jersey—1-2 songs per site location—over several weeks in February and March 2023. Each song was played a minimum of three times (“Notice parables of three in every other inference”). The boombox was battery-powered and preferably set atop a natural surface. No GPS was used to navigate to the sites; a superannuated Rand McNally folding map was utilized. Disorientation was embraced.]

Here is a clad doom.

—Clark Coolidge, “After Morandi” (c. 1984)

Oblivion: walking the edge of insanity sideways…

—Orko the Psykotik Alien, NMS, “Invisible Oblivion” (2003)

All the world had gone unreal, mere foolish play—a shoddy carnival, a magic show; and remembering those who had died…those real severed heads, mouths working in the dirt, those real bodies stretched and torn apart on the rack…

—John Gardner, Freddy’s Book (1980)

[SITE REF. → Holy, Holy, Holy Altar; Mt. Holly, NJ. The Jersey Devil was supposedly chained to the altar within the stone vault. Holy, Holy, Holy is inscribed across the lintel. Track played: “Static Vision.”]

I ask at the altar [paraphrasing Gardner]: WHO IS THIS SAURIAN BEING WITH THE GOATISH SMELL, THIS IDIOT GOD? On “Static Vision,” Fatboi Sharif bemoans the “info drain”—a residual from the age of the Info Kill. Company Flow told us we MUST GET IN SYNC, and Bigg Justoleum led the way as the horns blowed. Behold, in a dark universe Sharif is chasing shadows.

Sharif speaks lowly of the “blood-sucking corporations,” clued into Marx’s diagnoses. “Kapital,” Killah Karl spews, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Succulent, right, you sucker MCs? We’re frightened into the factories as the “news footage funnel[s] fear.” It’s “death [we] watch”—our own. Our work is “converted into necessaries,” Marxy Marx and the Funky Bunch writes, “by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced.” Yum yum, you Dray and Skoob dum-dums. This is your feast of grotesqueries.

[NB: I will be formatting Fatboi Sharif’s lyrics in a manner suitable to Clark Coolidge’s poetic lines in his 1967 chapbook entitled, confusingly, Clark Coolidge.]

KVU at the engineering deck, the control panel, the console—King Vision Ultra[-magnetizing], if you will—with ineffable efx. Super-scientifikal behind the boards, knob-turning and ear-worming like the Scientist that is/was Hopeton Overton Brown, almighty creator who Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981). Geng PTP with transformer coils cloying at your cortex, fair listener. His dub-infused engineering fits noface’s krunk-skronk productions and Sharif’s vertiginous vocals into deep-space and crypt-encasement, equally [EQ]. Cryptic, ’cause Sharif’s Sick Wid’ It meanings are entombed:

He’s hanging loose; forget the Smith & Wesson at the Smithsonian—they found a noose! What U See (Is What U Get) now in the xzibit. So raid the tombs of your own mind. Clark Coolidge, too: “Scratch of lines, on a vast hill or prone tomb. / Nothing buckles from them, no sneezed move” (from “After Morandi”).

I ain’t scared no more, Sharif shouts, dry-throated. He gargles holy water and spits. I can’t believe you, he hollers, as dubious as Du Bois staring down the Talented Tenth. Preaching In Havana is Fatboi Sharif penning editorials for The Crisis. Like Eric B. in ’88, he’s never scared. He seeks your AttenCHUN! Larger-than-life, like Bone Crusher on “Never Scared” in 2003: Now the plasma is oozing out of your cerebellum. Snort the bone dust or arrange the remains ritualistically.

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In Charles Chestnutt’s 1899 story “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” narrator John and his wife are warned by old man Julius about clearing a tract of swampland for agricultural use. “Uncle Julius” regales them with a murder account from slave days about a “conjuh man” who could make “monst’us powe’ful goopher” and used a “mixtry” to exact revenge for his son’s death. Through craft and cunning, the conjure man transforms the murderer into a gray wolf and cons him into killing his wife (similarly duped and transformed into a black cat). By crafty design, Julius’s tale keeps folks off that desirable tract of land with fears of what haunts it. But John is undeterred. He finds no evidence of a wolf’s dwelling there, and if a wolf “had once made his den there, his bones had long since crumbled into dust and gone to fertilize the rank vegetation.” Instead, John discovers a “bee-tree” with an “ample cavity in its trunk” and “stores of honey within.” Julius’s haint warning, it turns out, is nothing more than a ruse to maintain “his monopoly” over the honey stash. “Poison honeycomb, / Sticky situation,” Sharif says on “John Hinckley.”

[SITE REF. → Sybil’s Cave; Hoboken, NJ. An early 19th century natural spring excavated from the rock wall along the Hudson River; the cave was frequented by tavern-goers. Mary Rogers’ body was discovered in the shallow waters near the site, strangled and sexually abused, and the cave was eventually filled in. Track played: “The Hybrid.”]

I replied my brains in a hybrid of pain, Sharif raps on “The Hybrid,” his syntax clunking and skulking in ways that shouldn’t make sense but do. Let me explaaaaaiiiiin, he begs. Threats loom as “grenades surround ledge” and “PTSD particles” spread. (Cough into your elbow, won’t you?!) Don’t push; we’re close to the edge. Living on shaky grounds; let’s see if Sharif—like Rakim—knows the ledge. I’ve no doubt he does, but he still squeals like a teenybopper on the airport concourse:

“The eight-year-old with a pipe bomb by its privates” sounds like textbook projection. [Rapidly consults the DSM-5.] But let’s bring it back to A HYBRID OF PAIN. It’s Sharif’s term-in-ol-og-y, like Pharoahe Monch on “Bring It On”; he flows awkwardly and incisions are made into the [maggot] brain. Bring it on, motherfucker, bring it on—but also bring the pain like Meth. Sharif came to bring the pain hardcore from the [maggot] brain. We go inside his astral plane.

Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! Fatboi Sharif awakens like Bigger Thomas with fantasies of furnaces dancing in his head. [...alarm clock clanged…spring creaked…voice sang…surly grunt sounded…tinny ring of metal…] TURN IT UP! BRING THE NOISE! A certifiable consonantal ruckus—the brawling br-, the stinging /n/, the queasy -ng. KVU’s Pain of Mind (2018) comes to mind, undeniably.

[SITE REF. → Gates of Hell; Clifton, NJ. The “Gates of Hell” are a network of sewage tunnels and underground passageways behind the old Erie-Lackawanna railroad tracks. Devil worshipers frequent the location. Track played: “Sunday School Explosions.”]

Sharif combines elements: “Science with cosmic plague and Hooked On Phonics” (it worked for me!). He steals a complete set from the flea market and magnetizes the cassettes and places slips of Scotch tape over the top slots—write-protection begone and be-damned. He can feel his “pulse risen” at the “silent treatment” he receives from the ferric formulation spirits he summons—a kiss of haunting hiss. He translates “postcards in Arabic” at the “NA meeting” prior to filming a reproduction of the Jets and the Sharks dance-fight as “Cronenberg’s last scene.” What results is a “war world ouija [that] got West Side Story.” Thus, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein get flayed and slayed on “Sunday School Explosives.”

I’m still haunted by Fatboi Sharif’s echoey Oh, I’m buggin’? from Gandhi Loves Children’s “I’m Buggin.” It comes to me in my sleep, like the Sandman (“Enter Sandman near banquet,” Sharif raps on “John Hinckley,” and we’re off to Never Neverland Ranch with all the Culkins in Jacko’s bed). Not a hypnagogic vapor wave—but the dissonant hatred of Nicholas Sandmann silently smirking at the ceremonial drum of an Omaha elder as Black Hebrew Israelites shout gay-bashy slogans in the background. “Cronenberg’s last scene” will be as body-horrific as all his previous ones. Sharif feasts on a naked lunch of flesh sandwiches while typing Burroughs-like cut-ups onto a scarab beetle typewriter. He snorts lines of minced and mortared-and-pestled Black Meat—the guts and entrails of Scolopendra gigantea. “Oh, I’m buggin’?” has become an earworm, and Fatboi Sharif is every poor child pulling up to the ER with a cockroach lodged in its ear canal. Ruptured tympanic membranes at every entrance, each exit. To borrow a neologism from k-the-i?, Fatboi Sharif breeds electrobugs.

[SITE REF. → Shell Pile ghost town; Port Norris, NJ. Named for its mountains of oyster shells, a WPA guidebook from 1939 described Shell Pile as “a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes.” A pathogen known as MSX devastated the local oyster industry in the mid-50s, and the community never recovered. The shell piles remain. Track(s) played: “John Hinckley” and “Sugarcane Plantation.”]

In 1990, Tragedy Khadafi (née Intelligent Hoodlum) proposed we arrest the president (NB: Your mother’s buggin’—her mind slanted, he rapped). In 1992, Paris became a Bush Killa, delivering a bullet from the barrel of a Black guerrilla. In 1998, Non Phixion dropped “I Shot Reagan” and Sabac dragged First Lady Nancy into the crosshairs: “His wife’s the hostage, / Her body parts up in a grab-bag.” On “John Hinckley,” Sharif’s ode to POTUS-pistol whippings, he speaks of the “covenant grab-bag.” It’s a covenant signed by Tragedy, Paris, Non Phixion, and now Sharif himself (among many other signees—Chuck D comes to mind as he invokes the Honey Drippers’ nix-Nixon anthem and its foundational drum break on 1987’s “Rebel Without A Pause”: Impeach the president—pulling out my raygun).

“John Hinckley popped that president,” Sharif raps, and he did it with a naked raygun (...throb throb…throb throb…)—a Röhm RG-14. Sharif rap-renders the scene into a 60-second assassination, and he can sympathize with Hinckley—both film buffs, fans of Taxi Driver (1976). Jodie Foster—the child-actor playing child-prostitute—turned into a child-bride in Hinckley’s obsessive mind. Hinckley’s single “We Got That Chemistry” is streaming on all DSPs—I’m searching the liner notes for the Sharif feature; a collab for the ages.

For his assassination plot, Fatboi Sharif readies “gun fire sun visor” with “spinning Budweiser breath.” He’s funky cold medina, cold lampin’, and “coldstone hypnotic.” He opens the “seventh seal,” chopping and playing chess with Myka 9 and Max von Sydow in a seaside “fog of chronic.” This is Sharif’s “daily operation”—peep him on the cover of Gang Starr’s Daily Operation (1992). He’s there—amongst the messy mahogany table covered with money stacks, Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man in America paperback, typewriter, and skull. He’s there—top-right, hiding behind the mounted boar’s head. He wears it like a mask. The illest brother when he gets his mic check.

He’s ready and willing to go underground—deep cavities and cavernous tunnelways:

After he goes for the headshot (like John Wilkes Booth with his derringer, like those old Rhymesayers cassette tapes…), Sharif’s weapon is a “soul glowing hidden in the briefcase.” The execution is the pulpiest fiction emanating an aura of Diaspora Problems.

In David Gordon Green’s 2000 film George Washington, the character George—young, strange, and Black—“had to be very careful never to get his head wet…”:

See, his fontanel was very, very, very, very soft. Like a baby’s head. And when he soaks it or itches it, it irritates his brain. He don’t like it, ’cause if somebody hit him in his head, he’d probably die.

As George and his group of mangy misfits fool around in a bathroom, another character, Buddy, pushes George and bangs his head against the wall. In retaliation, George pushes Buddy who slips and loses consciousness. When he comes to, blood begins to dribble from a crack in his skull and he ends up slumped in a urine-splashed stall—dead. “Everything’s blue in this world—all fuzzy,” Trent Reznor groans on Nine Inch Nails’ “The Downward Spiral,” “Spilling out of my head,” and from such a tiny little hole.

The character Nasia speaks with a Malick-inspired voiceover. Considering the unsettling tone and disquieting details of the film’s narration, Nasia’s name may as well be “Nausea.” Nas: I’m out for dead presidents to represent me. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Ronald Reagan, et al. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Nausicaä collects spore samples (like Ced-Gee collected Melvin Bliss records and transformed “Synthetic Substitution” into “Ego Trippin’”) and is eventually revived by Ohmu tentacles. Miyazaki’s ravaged world—his crushed-killed-destroyed eco-stressed landscape—is like Bliss sings: “Synthetic substitution has taken over this land, / There’s no one to blame but man.” Those monstrous Ohmu are roly-polies [Armadillidium vulgare] navigating digable planets. Oh, I’m buggin’?

In Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Kathy Acker’s “mysterious Mr Linker” rhetorically asks: “Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre—you must read Nausea in the French, in English it is nothing—have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are able to go beyond.” [Acker also depicts her protagonist Janey getting assaulted by a man whose “hands ran huge insects down (her) back.” Oh…I’m…buggin’?]

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Earlier in George Washington, Buddy paces a stage in some dilapidated auditorium (all the film's settings are ruinous—real Sharif video shoot environs) with a T-Rex mask on as he recites passages from the Book of Job:

All kinds of pests, like, all over its legs. Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me: When His lamp shone over my head...and by His light I walked through darkness: When I was in my prime: When the friendship of God was upon my tent: When the Almighty was with me: When my children were around me: When my steps were washed with milk...and the rock poured out for me streams of oil.

[SITE REF. → Venusian alien contact location; West Main Street; High Bridge, NJ. Howard Menger purported to bear witness to cosmic lifeforms on his property. Track(s) played: “1999 Hacker Worldwide” and “Parasite.”]

Let transmission commence. Fatboi Sharif bends and adjusts the rabbit ears antenna on “1999 Hacker Worldwide.” Through the snow and noise (talkin’ about static vision, folx) emerges a “televised child slave, / Live at 11” (later, on “Sugarcane Plantation,” it’s the “news at 12” when he’ll “crucify white Jesus” on a live-feed). The commercial break previews what’s coming up next: “Tonight we loot the church.” Yes, loot the church and the monastery, because you know now that the Dalai Lama leaves your boo-boo achin’ like Bambaataa and requests you suck his tongue. Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Sharif’s a bad, bad boy, in the pitchdown death-voice of Kid Hood on ATCQ’s “Scenario (Remix)”—his opening salvo is a son’s cry as he was murdered just days after recording his verse shirtless in the booth [cut to footage of Sharif performing shirtless]. “He didn’t say hello or nothin’,” Q-Tip told The Source for Hood’s obituary, “he just started rhymin’.” Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Anthony Iles sees “the suspension of the normal ordering” and “new and unforeseen relations” between objects and behaviors when we loot. “[W]hen looters use a mannequin leg to break a shop window to impose some asset relocation from below we are talking about media as impure means.” Sharif’s got the impurest means and the impurest thoughts.

The carnivalesque catastrophe of Fatboi Sharif’s mind unravels. You know the “economy collapsing” and “fi…nan…cial by…pass…ing”—all that hocus-pocus. [I’m shaping your brain like pot…ter…y, Monch says, his motor temporarily running low on power but only to deconstruct the temporality.] Sharif has access; he’s got the “skeleton key” as he danses macabre, as he speaks “open sesame,” pulling from Antoine Galland’s orientalist Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves (or his Sporty Thievz, but the tomb raiders and grave robbers ain’t getting nada from us). Open Sesame Street to hip-hop. See MC Lyte rock the stoop in her purple sweatsuit. Sharif riding side-saddle on Snuffleupagus with the subwoofer pumping KMD’s “Humrush,” Bert philosophizing Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā). (Oh, an empty place…a perfect place to practice the exciting art of humming.) Meanwhile, Sharif is on an expedition to “Woodstock 2030.” The brown acid warning still reverberates across space and time and he’s finger-crossed that there’s a few tabs left (the “final acid trip” he growls about on “5G Celsius Cell Tower”).

“1999 Hacker Worldwide” plays like Y2K paranoia—a glitch-hop ode to the millennium bug (Oh, I’m buggin’?). Kool Keith emerged as Black Elvis in 1999 and proceeded to get Lost in Space. The soundbombing of Common and Sadat X on “One-Nine-Nine-Nine” [...inch nails through each one of my eyelids, c. ’99] penetrated RealAudio players, and the Hi-Teknological production set the doom mood. On “Parasite,” Sharif “ride[s] a push on a Greyhound / Searching for a way out” with Dirt McGirt inflections. Behold a Pale Snuffleupagus.

[SITE REF. → VHS Walkway; Fort Lee, NJ. The original motion picture industry in America was located in Fort Lee, and in that spirit, a patio and walkway made up of VHS tapes surrounds a private residence. Track played: “Paging Dr. noface.”]

Fatboi Sharif has an ongoing appointment with his octagonecologyst, but Dr. Octagon isn’t answering his calls. Instead, he pages Dr. noface. And noface’s sonix are aptly described in Gardner’s Freddy’s Book: “Outside someone was again banging metal against metal. The sound was too irregular to be the work of a hammer, and the sound was sometimes loud, sometimes lighter, a mere clink.” noface takes the folk of “If I Had A Hammer” and filters it through his failed state fuzz. Peep him on the PTP cassette cover, his void-face hidden behind a Baphomet mask. He flexes his equilibrium—a sabbatic goat prematurely goated. He’s Black Phillip from Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), pacing his pen and passing you a ballpoint pen to sign your deal with the Devil. He doesn’t blink—redaction bars for pupils. “It was true that the Devil could sometimes read one’s mind,” Gardner writes, “that once he’d gotten into you there seemed to be no shaking him; but at least one could in some measure limit the monster’s conversation.” Sharif’s conversation with the listener knows no limits, though. For noface’s Baphomet cosplaying, Gardner’s Devil masquerades as a mule:

“What kind of fool are you, trying to block out the voice of the Devil with your fingers?” the mule scoffed. “Plug your ears with pebbles if it pleases you, and sing at the top of your voice to drown me out. I’ll still be heard!”

noface will still be heard as he activates the widening gyre (peace, Yeats) that is Preaching In Havana.

Furthermore, the album is a set of interlocking spirals—a helix, a hex. Spin yourself silly on a spiral staircase to Hell—ride a helicoid to the void. Listen as you’re yeah-boyee’d by the endless [eternal and infernal] echo of Flavor Flav—voices whirlpooling the River Styx. Eyes pierced by an unwound spiral notebook containing handwritten transcriptions of Malleus Maleficarum. noface’s productions aren’t beats; they’re dungeon bludgeonings. His loops are spirals, deranged and ceaselessly spinning out of control. A loop begins linear but soon goes labyrinthine. In Dante’s Inferno, his circles of suffering—circles and circles, oodles and oodles and oodles of o’s—from embryo to man and back again, form a downward spiral. Reznor razor-wire torture. “Slow it behoveth our descent to be,” the Italian in the Black medallion (no gold) writes. According to him, we have to acclimate “to the sad blast”—but I prefer to get dizzy from the disorientation.

In an interview with Fatboi Sharif for The Next Movement podcast, co-host E. Fortson precisely sketches Preaching In Havana’s lineage to Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992). On Preaching In Havana, she tells Sharif, it feels as if we’re granted access to his mind: “We’re hearing your internal thoughts, and we can witness how you’re processing them.” On Styler’s “Heaven Don’t Want Me and Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over,” the message blares like a Network nervous breakdown: “NEWS, NEWS, AND NEWS! MORE BLUESY NEWS!!!” Sharif adopts the mantle of the mad prophet of the airwaves.

Fatboi Sharif holds not a conch to his ear but a nautilus—a mollusk with musical musculature. What Bob James calls the “atmospheric orchestration” of “Nautilus” (1974) unravels as an infinite scroll for sample use—hordes of hip-hop producers synthesizing and submerging the oceanic depths Bob James chose to navigate. They abide by the spells Sharif proposes on “Sugarcane Plantation”: a “PCP posted, / Psychedelic relic, / Road atlas.” Their stems create helices of recorded sound—much like noface. Preaching In Havana devolves into a Wichita Vortex Sutra in an Allen Ginsberg mode, only to reveal the Beat poet’s affiliation with NAMBLA and how he squeezed my uncle’s thigh once at a book signing hoping for lemon juice to run down his leg.

Oh, the places you’ll go! Suessian spirals lead us to the Final Whorl Front. We link galaxy arms across the universe—needle our way through the Realm of the Nebulae. We crack the human genome with DNAlysis and hogtie James Watson in the process. Evocations of the inventor’s spring, of horrific histories like the lynch mob’s corkscrew used on Luther Holbert in 1904 in Doddsville, Mississippi to bore holes into his body and extract, in the words of the Vicksburg Evening Post, “quivering flesh.” On “Sugarcane Plantation,” Sharif is howling—he “yell[s] terrorist threats, / The coldest spirit, / In pig Latin” (emphasis on pig). His anti-rhymes coordinate with Lune TNS’s “Plantation Rhymes.” Pliny the Elder described comets as “knot[s] of fire” with an appearance that was “twisted like a spiral.” We’re fired up. Sharif’s got incendiary comments for daze, and each hits like a Molotov.

Sharif paints with a Tesla coil—streamer arcs and brush discharges. Voltage flashing from his cranium. As Kool Keith says, he’s “Eveready, like a battery—charged, / [He’s] worth the alkaline.” Ultramagnetic, indeed. Play Preaching In Havana backwards. Watch Fatboi Sharif perform: a human Fraser spiral illusion—hypnotic, fuck up your optics like ELUCID fucks up electronics. Misalignments and distortions. Ha, Sharif is sicker than your average. Can’t you see? Sometimes his words just hypnotize you. Or, as Archimedes wrote in On Spirals circa 225 BC:

I say that the area added by the spiral in the third revolution will be double of that added in the second, that in the fourth three times, that in the fifth four times, and generally the areas added in the later revolutions will be multiples of that added in the second revolution according to the successive numbers, while the area bounded by the spiral in the first revolution is a sixth part of that added in the second revolution.

Right? Right. (Oh, you buggin’?)

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Like the dark and droney ambience of Bobby Krlic’s Haxan Cloak moniker, noface fashions his own Excavation Musick, digging deep only to resurface, bedraggled and cloak tattered. Krlic (also noted for his role as an Ari Aster collaborator) described his first album as “a person’s decline towards death.” His follow-up was described as a “journey [to] a different plane.”

The 1922 silent film Hӓxan, directed by Benjamin Christensen [“hӓxan”: Swedish for witch], plays like watching Fatboi Sharif perform live on mute. Christensen’s goal was to “throw light on the psychological causes of…witch trials by demonstrating their connections with certain abnormalities of the human psyche, abnormalities which have existed throughout history and still exist in our midst.” Such abnormalities exist—gloriously—on Preaching In Havana.

One of Hӓxan’s intertitles details “the terrible confessions” that can be “forced from [a victim] in less than a minute” by using the thumbscrew [tumskruv]. (The thumbscrew, naturally, being yet another spiral.) The brevity of the songs on Preaching In Havana have the same excruciating effect.

[SITE REF. → Bergwald Nazi Bund Camp; Federal Hill; Bloomingdale, NJ. The ruins of a Nazi Youth camp that was shut down by the FBI in 1941. The remnants of a stone cistern, storage silo, cabinets, and iron grates are still visible. Track played: “Nazi Needle Marks.”]

Outspoken about his adoration for Gonjasufi, Sharif channels his die-verse-ified voice often. We could compare his timbral offerings to Gonjasufi’s delivery on “Venom” from 2012’s MU.ZZ.LE. It’s not “singing” we hear, per se—it’s [sin]ging, it’s [singe]ing—transgressive, burning; a vicious and venomous flow. Sharif’s baritone [bury-tone] is throat-scourged. Liken it to the outro on Busta Rhymes’ When Disaster Strikes… (1997) where Busta screams and talks, stalks and fiends—“rap” as emceeing; “rap” as talking. Give me that ol’ “Preparation for the Final World[/Whorl] Front” religion.

On “Nazi Needle Marks,” Sharif raps in “nauseous nasal chalk-line intervals,” to use his own phrase. The French Revolution comes for the Queen in b-boy style: “Exorcism Antoinette headspin.” The guillotine uprocks and downrocks until Marie’s dome rolls off the platform and into the crowd. Regan projectile vomits the greenest sticky-icky as she goes full Rock Steady on the 180-degree rotation. “Death of a salesman,” Sharif mutters with anti-consumerist ire. In Sharif’s looney-tune universe, Arthur Miller dicks down Marilyn Monroe before penning the final pages of his play—post-coital when he sends Willy Loman’s Studebaker speeding into a suicide machine. As for Marilyn, maybe it’s the “poison dart slumped her.”

Sharif says a prayer at the altar of the Beastie Boys’ prank-calling “Cooky Puss” (1983):

These pussy crumbs are making me itch! Sharif and the ill-communicating saboteurs are capable of making our skin crawl, not unlike El-P pontificating about how he “could suck a cookie out a pussy, no question” on Co Flow’s “Definitive.” Sick fux. Before long, Sharif is back inhaling John Brown’s vaporizer and riding a white steed. He’s gonna “burn [the] village in search of [his] masterrrrr.” Torches, pitchforks, and hedge-shears in his holster. Fighting fire with fire to the point of self-immolation is a necessity for survival. Kathy Acker shows us what we’re up against:

One of the landlords burned down his building so he could collect the insurance money. Two families and one pimp were sleeping in this building when it burned down. The landlord sold the charred lot for lots of money to McDonald’s, a multinational fast food concern. This is how poor people become transformed into hamburger meat.

Or, as Sharif would versify it:

Ridin’ filthy-mangy-grimy-raunchy-dirty out of Rahway, bumping the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in the lemon. Screaming, lung-top, with Jello Biafra: We ain’t trying to be police. “The Nazi showed his needle marks” like the NJ state trooper showed his “Blood Honor” neck tats on his driver’s license photo ID.

[SITE REF. → Ong’s Hat village; Pemberton Township, NJ. Deep in the Pine Barrens, a group known as the Moorish Science Ashram established an Institute of Chaos Studies in Ong’s Hat and opened a portal to another dimension. Track played: “5G Celsius Cell Tower.”]

On “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” the cell tower sprouts polystyrene branches and the drones surveil the 5G conspiracists—they wouldn’t dare. Sharif says things have become “ice storm hazardous,” with the soul-lift of Godfather Don—we’re talking about a hellofasong. Fever-inducing frequencies are emitted, so Sharif raps like he’s caught an ague—he’s “breaking atoms.” The cover of Main Source’s Breaking Atoms (1991), which includes a spiral-in-the-making comprised of protons, neutrons, electrons [read it in the tone of Prince Po’s insight, foresight, more sight from OK’s “Releasing Hypnotical Gases”—yes, hypnotical], flashes across our mind’s eye.

“Jacob’s ladder staggered on” as a symbol of numbskull persistence. Sharif trudges through the stagger grass [a man from the meadows], swaggering like Stagolee, and he’s stopping for an intermission to stream one of his fave films: Jacob’s Ladder (1990). His physical form atomizes as he hallucinates the rungs of Jacob’s ladder twist and deform and become a helix. (William Blake’s 1805 watercolor shows a spiraling ascent.) Sharif cannonballs instead into the Boogiemonsters’ “Old Man Jacob’s Well” (1994)—a well where souls dwell. “I got the cravings again of the wicked,” and child abductions are the only answer. Demented, sick, and vile. Climb Jacob’s jaundiced ladder from well-to-cell tower.

The temperature’s rising on the “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” and we’ve got our culprit for coronaviruses, microchip implants, and mind control. But what you’ve really got to be concerned with—many people are saying—is that havoc-causing Havana syndrome. Fatboi Sharif is here to get idiopathic for you idiots. He’s hunkered down at the U.S. embassy in Cuba while the C.I.A. (Criminals In Action) claims Fidel Castro’s corpse is responsible. Someone somewhere under some top-secret security clearance is whispering about Sharif, and his ears ring out with tinnitus intensity. Ours, too.

↴

By now you know Fatboi Sharif is an atrocity exhibitionist who’d have the PMRC’s panties in a bunch, an MC whose processional route is the Stations of the Crass. Just as Chuck D’s voice from “Bring the Noise” (Once again, back, it’s the incredible…) reverberates through time, Fatboi Sharif’s tone pongs within the popcorn walls of our mind [substitute diabolical for incredible, though]. His white noise machine is a gnash teeth-grinder, perfection for fist-fucking fascists ’til they see shuriken stars between their eyes. I’m reminded of the caustic words of upfromsumdirt—his poem “Orisha Obsidious”:

this embryo of dark / black space spiral / virile midnight swirling / this onyx wet and non-unctuous vaginal and oleaginous this / this magnetic venom rancid with non-white wonder / rancid with non-white vocabulary self-servile, reverse-transcendent - pagan and perversely reported with discarded veins throbbing in black omniscience / chews its own adventure

In the “Static Vision” video, Sharif wears a fencing mask like a soiled diaper, a MU.ZZ.LE on loan from Gonjasufi. Olaudah Equiano was familiar:

I had seen a black woman slave…and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink….I afterwards learned [it] was called the iron muzzle.

The muzzle Equiano describes is depicted on Gonjasufi’s album cover, albeit shaded and spectrummed. He and Sharif both rupture the iron muzzle with punctuated flashes of resistance, hence the cleaving periods [MU.ZZ.LE]—they’ve got the makings of an ellipsis.

[SITE REF. → Mary’s Tower; Flemington, NJ. A dilapidated edifice in a wooded area off a county road. “Mary” committed suicide in a third story bedroom and her red-eyed specter haunts the tower. Track(s) played: “Smells Like Autopsy” and “Fentanyl Firing Squad.”]

I’m gonna allow Kathy Acker to set the scene for “Fentanyl Firing Squad”:

We had heard that this rock band called THE CONTORTIONS was gonna play in a redneck town in New Jersey and the white head singer thought he was James Brown. The rest of the band would be too drunk to stop the rednecks from beating up Brown.

James Brown was crawling baby-style across the floor. The rednecks were jerking their cocks off in a corner. James Brown crawled up to the redneck's boot. The redneck, confused, jumped James. Everyone in the club started hitting each other. I heard cops' sirens. I ran.

Acker writes Blood and Guts in High School in blood and guts—smeared and splattered. (L7 tossed tampon tricks and theatrics. Find yourself hungry for stink.) Picture “pig” painted in blood on Sharon Tate’s white front door by the Manson Family—the recording location of NIN’s The Downward Spiral [“spiral,” motherfucker, spiral!]. Reznor seethes on “Piggy”: “Black and blue and broken bones, / You left me here, I’m all alone.” Tally two hog heads for the haram tableau:

Sharif surely strikes a vital nerve, proving he’s been the nastiest one since birth [auto/matic…]. He can “purple haze testify” to that—and with the Fuzz Face pedal helping him power through what nixed Hendrix: a puke puddle; axed down by Vesperax. “Smells Like Autopsy,” hmm? Not like Teen Spirit scrrrawled by Kathleen Hanna on Kurdt’s wall. noface detours through The Caretaker’s haunted ballroom. That must be the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of his [no]face.

↴

Poet Phillip B. Williams introduces a Black hauntology, one of creaky floorboards and box fans that whisper in their manufacturing of wind. Williams calls each haunting “a loop of existence.” In “Haunting, Blackness, and Algorithmic Thought,” an essay that appears in a 2021 issue of e-flux journal, Ezekiel Dixon-Román reminds us of Derrida’s insight that “in every being there is a haunting.” Dixon-Román sees possibility in this. He conceives an “operation of Black techno-conjuring [as] a technological force that has the potential to reroute and alter the logic of the system.” With Fatboi Sharif’s steady output of discursive, deviant deviations, you can’t tell me he isn’t the prime mover of such potentialities. It’s not all so gravitationally heavy, though, seeing as how Sharif floats and flits about with the wreckless abandon of Slimer.

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 1:

I wanted to completely unhinge the language and then see if I could put it, if that would make an energy that would then hook up in some other way, like a magnet, like resistance—poles pushing and coming together…. There wasn’t any system of structures. The space between words became very important. How close together they were…. [Y]ou know what loop-players are? You make a loop of tape and there are these tape machines that have one play-back head and a single drive-wheel and you can put a loop on it and it has a rheostat knob so you can change the speed. I was doing these experiments…. I put a couple of words, or even one word at first, one each on two loops and put them both on, and I’d vary the times. And I swear that I could see…in fact, I wish that someone would scientifically follow this up, it was interesting. Let’s say that you had “of this”,—you had “of” on one tape and “this” on another, and you would change the times until they came closer together in time and farther away, and I swear that you could join and become a phrase, and one millisecond on either side of that they don’t, they’re disembodied, and I got fascinated with that. I had this thing, I made a tape out of it, where they went in and out of phrase with each other for a half hour period so you could follow this, and I thought, well, hey, that’s interesting…. You really began to feel there was a magnetic force in language.

—Clark Coolidge interview with FRICTION magazine, Number 7 (1984)

[sample pack from Clark Coolidge, 1967]

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 2:

For Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” (1979), drummer Stephen Morris sprayed an aerosol can of tape head cleaner into a microphone to produce a drum sound (that’s a KVU move if I’ve ever seen one). Morris nearly passed out from the fumes. Fatboi Sharif has timewarped and is in that recording booth as a willing huffer of chlorofluorocarbons. What he produces as a result is a babbling brook of jabberwocky jargons:

Sharif clearly audited classes at Clark Coolidge’s School of Disembodied Poetics—body-the-track training, if you will. His method isn’t just sheer madness. He takes rumors of “bad blood’ and infusions of syphilis to the face. He spins plastic bendy straws into gold but not before sucking a spiral of backwashed spit from his cauldron. Wu-Tang is for the children, but Sharif is here to scare the children with his fury and fairy tales. Just accept it. After all, “our brains been programmed for so loooong!”

Images:

Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail) | Holy, Holy, Holy Altar (screenshot, via YouTube) | The Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, 1981 (album cover) | Gates of Hell (screenshot, via YouTube) | Hooked on Phonics cassette set | Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1984 (screenshot) | George Washington, dir. David Gordon Green, 2000 (screenshot) | Venusian alien contact location (screenshot, via YouTube) | Apple Lisa Workshop not accepting Y2K date | "The Sabbatic Goat" from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi (1856) | Drawing by Nikola Tesla showing stages in his evolution of the high frequency resonant transformer used in his Tesla coil (1899) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Carvel "Cookie Puss" TV commercial (1985) | Jacob's Dream, William Blake (c. 1805) | "Slave with Iron Muzzle," illustration from Souvenirs d'un aveugle, Jacques Etienne Victor Arago (1839) | Mary's Tower (screenshot, via YouTube) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail)

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taiblogcomics · 2 months ago

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Half-Assed and Half Done

Hey there, razor blades in the candy. It's Halloween! I'm here to give you the biggest scare I can think of: the knowledge that we're only halfway through Countdown. Are you terrified yet??

Here's the cover:

Oh yeah, I haven't been coy about this at all, but the halfway point is where the comic finally reveals what it's counting down to. It's the only part of "I'm replicating reading this from week to week" that I haven't tried to hide. Mostly coz ultimately it won't even matter! I'm still just gonna call it Countdown in running text for simplicity. Anyway, here's a cool poster of the Monitor. Probably Solomon? Does it matter? Does it do anything for anybody? Off to a great spooky start for Halloween, eh~?

Halfway point recap! The Multiverse Crew are half-dead from Monarch's attack. Jimmy Olsen is half-dressed on his adventure with Forager. Pied Piper and Trickster are half-lucky having just escaped the Suicide Squad yet again. Karate Kid and Una are half-desperate chasing yet another lead to cure his disease. Mary Marvel is half-gone down her turn to evil under Eclipso's tutelage. And Holly Robinson and Harley Quinn are half-exhausted when their training camp turns out to have military prison overtones. Sadly, we're not half done this review yet, so let's get into it!

So how do we celebrate this, the precise halfway point of our long ongoing maxiseries? Well, it's mostly a recap issue. Oh boy! If you didn't think comics could have clipshows, I am here to disabuse you of this notion. Yes, all but the last few pages are of Solomon addressing his fellow Monitors on the whole of the situation. Mayhaps this will finally inspire them to do something? Also, we get a group shot of all these Monitors, and if they're meant to represent their respective universes, I wonder which universes the tiny Monitor represents. Or the bug-faced one.

A noseless female Monitor says Solomon hasn't presented any evidence that all these events link together to form a multiversal disaster they should care about. Solomon's retorts that they're only seeing things from the limited perspective of their own universes, whereas only he has the big brain to see the 52 universes as a collective. He uses the evidence of Crisis on Infinite Earths as his proof. Once, after all, there was only one Monitor. But then the universes eroded and now they're split into 52 separate beings. Isn't that worse, he asks. Well, the readers sure think so, so maybe he has a point~

Solomon warns that they now stand on the brink of another such multiversal cataclysm. And sorry, but no. Obviously they didn't know it at the time, but Final Crisis was hardly on the level of its two previous Crises of the Infinite variety. (It was also hardly "Final", but if Final Fantasy gets away with that 16 times, we'll let it slide here too.) Like, Final Crisis was a big deal. But it didn't have any multiverse-threatening consequences. The threats were all pretty Earth-localised, from what I remember. Ah, the benefits of hindsight.

Anyways, Solomon starts banging on about Monarch being the biggest problem, with his dipping into other universes to recruit his army. One Monitor even points out that they made Forerunner, and she defected to Monarch's side. And since she's been his herald to each of these universes, isn't this kind of their fault? So between Forerunner and the recruits from Earth-3, he could easily set himself up as the literal Monarch of the entire multiverse. Or, perhaps a single unified reality made from his conquests.

Another Monitor points out this doesn't prove anything, and Solomon then turns his attention to the New Gods threat. You know, if they all die, it could bring about the end of the Fourth World? And that was something Final Crisis was about. They had to kill the New Gods twice just to get to the story where they actually were meant to die. Anyways, Solomon posits that the serial murders of the New Gods are a deliberate act, which I suppose stands to reason. Like, he means it as i to subvert a prophecy, but his word choice was weird. "The New Gods are dying! Not as fortold, but a deliberate act!" So really, it's not that they're dying that bothers you, just the method.

In one of the only times other characters besides the Monitors do something in this issue, Forager and Jimmy Olsen warp in onto Apokalips and start battling Parademons. This naturally shows a very strong display of Jimmy's survival-based powers, and Solomon submits for their approval that whatever force has empowered Jimmy to such a degree clearly has an interest in seeing him survive the coming Crisis. The other Monitors murmur among themselves about these facts, which is just another iteration of "Should we do something?"

So following that, Solomon next brings up the big point: their wayward fellow Monitor, the one dubbed "Bob". Now he's the one Solomon is actually big mad about. And while Solomon is ranting about how dare Bob help the multiversally doomed in their search for the oft-rumoured Ray Palmer instead of standing against them, it actually picks up in the background where last issue left off: Jason Todd having shot Donna Troy, while Kyle Rayner attacks him in retaliation. Literally, something that should've been a major focus is just shown in a few frames in the background while Solomon narrates over it.

Anyway, Solomon posits that Bob is the worst because, while nobody else truly knows that their actions will lead to an alleged multiversal crisis, their brother most certainly does. This makes it their mission to stand against him in particular. The Monitors, the eternal observers, must now do something. In fact, they must go to war! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin', but slowly the various other Monitors begin to agree. And they all start cheering "United as one!" while pumping their fists in the air, all while Solomon stares down at them, smirking like a jerk.

Meanwhile, on the monitors (the screens the guys are watching, not the guys themselves), Bob breaks up the fight between Jason and Kyle and teleports them out. Kyle's still steamed, but not as much as Donna, which is fair since she was the one who got shot. She belts Jason in the stomach, then kicks him in the back of the head. Having read Red Hood and the Outlaws for many years for this blog, that's pretty satisfying. Not satisfying to make up for the dumb part that follows it, but pretty good.

And ah yes, said dumb part. Kyle marvels that Donna is up and around, and Bob reveals that her feigning unconsciousness was to let them mask an escape in the confusion. Donna then says it doesn't make up for Jason having shot her. Except she doesn't use his name, she instead makes a portmanteau of his last name (Todd) with the R-slur. Use your imagination, I won't write it out. Kyle follows this with a dumb grin and "Ha! Good one, Donna." Which, no, it wasn't. This is out of character for both of them, and while that word was in more common use back in 2007, it's still pretty offensive for a superhero to say.

Bob interjects, having just sensed his brethren uniting as one, and rushes them to teleport again, insisting finding Ray Palmer became all the more urgent. And while they warp out again, we cut back to Earth-15. You remember, that "perfect Earth" from a few issues back? Some caped individual dressed in black (no, not Batman) is beating the hell out of Lex Luthor, ranting on and on about what he wanted to do, what Lex failed to do. Lex, bleeding and trembling, asks what it was he was supposed to have done. And said figure tells him that he could've made the universe perfect.

Anyway, after that strong bit of foreshadowing, the Monitors are no longer in their base, but zipping around in a big spherical space station. You know, a Death Star. Great look, Solomon! They're still talking, debating where to strike first. And of course, the big question to this is, who has the most to gain from a big multiversal dustup? This ends the comic by showing Darkseid in his own quarters, standing around in contemplation, and showing his big action figure collection all over his chessboard. Hmm, who indeed~?

Well, this issue sucked. Like, it would've been kind of bland as a regular issue, but instead it's the comic equivalent of a clipshow while Solomon rants at us for almost 20 pages. This might be the comic where the fewest things actually happen, and one of the only things that does happen is Donna Troy using an ableist slur. So, you know, not a great issue!

#comics #reviews #Countdown to Final Crisis #Countdown #Taiblog

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ulkaralakbarova · 4 months ago

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A blind Vietnam vet, trained as a swordfighter, comes to America and helps to rescue the son of a fellow soldier. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Nick Parker: Rutger Hauer Frank Devereaux: Terry O’Quinn Billy Devereaux: Brandon Call Cobb: Charles Cooper MacCready: Noble Willingham Annie Winchester: Lisa Blount Lynn Devereaux: Meg Foster The Assassin: Sho Kosugi Slag: Randall “Tex” Cobb Lyle Pike: Nick Cassavetes Tector Pike: Rick Overton Latin Girl: Julia González Gang Leader: Paul James Vasquez Crooked Miami Cop #1: Woody Watson Crooked Miami Cop #2: Alex Morris Bus Station Cop: Mark Fickert Popcorn: Weasel Forshaw Six Pack: Roy Morgan Snow: Tim Mateer Female Biker: C.K. McFarland Cornfield Killer #1: T.J. McFarland Cornfiled Killer #2: Blue Deckert Cornfield Killer #3: Glenn Lampert Cornfield Killer #4: Red Mitchell Rockwell Mom: Bonnie Suggs Rockwell Dad: Harold Suggs Freeway Lady #1: Barbara Gulling-Goff Freeway Lady #3: Holly Cross Vagley Freeway Lady #2: Dorothy Young Colleen: Sharon Shackelford Casino Bodyguard #1: Jay Pennison Casino Bodyguard #2: Masanori Toguchi Crooked Croupier: R. Nelson Brown Croupier #2: Lincoln Casey Jr. Croupier #3: Gene Skillen Big Mama: Debora Williams Casino Cowboy: Kyle Thatcher Casino Patron: Patricia Mathews Waiter in Elevator: Mitch Hrushowy Penthouse Guard #1: Ernest Mack Penthouse Guard #2: Linwood Walker Drug Dealer: Robert Prentiss Ski Lodge Killer #1: Jeffrey J. Dashnaw Ski Lodge Killer #2: Glenn R. Wilder Ski Lodge Killer #3: David R. Ellis Ski Lodge Killer #4: Michael Adams Ski Lodge Killer #5: Dave Bartholomew Ski Lodge Killer #6: Fred Lerner Ski Lodge Killer #7: Mike Shanks Ski Lodge Killer #8: Ray Colbert Film Crew: Director of Photography: Don Burgess Executive Producer: Robert W. Cort Producer: Daniel Grodnik Director: Phillip Noyce Producer: Tim Matheson Executive Producer: David Madden Associate Producer: Charles Robert Carner Production Design: Peter Murton Editor: David A. Simmons Original Music Composer: J. Peter Robinson Location Manager: Carole Fontana Unit Production Manager: Dennis Stuart Murphy Location Scout: Mike Harrowing Set Designer: Lauren E. Polizzi Title Designer: Michael Lodge Costume Design: Katherine Dover Production Coordinator: Jeffrey J. Kiehlbauch Casting Assistant: Louise Marrufo Production Coordinator: Gina Scheerer Casting: Junie Lowry-Johnson Casting Associate: William A. Johnson Art Direction: John Myhre Casting Assistant: Elisa Goodman Location Manager: Susan Elkins Script Supervisor: Helen Caldwell Set Decoration: Tom Talbert Second Unit Director: Dick Ziker Key Makeup Artist: Karoly Balazs Special Effects Makeup Artist: J.C. Matalon Assistant Hairstylist: Jan Sebastian Key Makeup Artist: Jeanne Van Phue Hairstylist: Cinzia Zanetti Production Manager: Leonard Bram Executive In Charge Of Production: Ted Zachary Additional Second Assistant Director: Sandy Collister Second Assistant Director: K.C. Colwell First Assistant Director: Tom Davies Second Assistant Director: Douglas Dean III Second Assistant Director: Thomas A. Irvine First Assistant Director: Donald P.H. Eaton Second Unit Director: Max Kleven Set Dresser: Joel Bestrop Art Direction: Michael Marcus Set Decoration: Nicholas T. Preovolos Sound Editor: Gregg Baxter Production Sound Mixer: Jacob Goldstein Assistant Sound Editor: David Hagberg Sound Re-Recording Mixer: Grover B. Helsley Sound Editor: Michael Hilkene Sound Mixer: Walter Hoylman Sound Editor: David M. Ice Sound Editor: Doug Jackson Special Sound Effects: Eric Lindemann Sound Re-Recording Mixer: William L. McCaughey Boom Operator: Prometheus Patient ADR Editor: Tally Paulos Foley Mixer: Troy Porter Sound Re-Recording Mixer: Richard D. Rogers Foley Artist: Joan Rowe Sound Editor: Christopher Sheldon Assistant Sound Editor: Thomas W. Small Foley Artist: Jerry Trent Special Effects Coordinator: Martin Bresin Special Effects Assistant: Steven C. Foster Special Effects Assistant: Marvin Gardner Special Effects Coordinator: Allen Hall Special Effects Supervisor: Mike Manzel Special Effects Assistant: Joe Montenegr...

#blind man #casino #downfall #martial arts #sword fight #Top Rated Movies #vietnam #vietnam war

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unoisveimved-un-proffesional · 2 years ago

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The Boys to me is such a crazy series because it’s like super powers were just thrown in to what would’ve been a heist movie with anger issues and spotty past man and his new guy sidekick, with an anti-capitalist overtone, and it’s incredible? Like I’m watching something that just, shouldn’t exist? Like watching Joel from The Last Of Us go up against Injustice’s Superman, with a blatant disdain for corporations with shady practices and consumer culture, on the fucking Amazon Streaming Service?! Crazy…

And yeah, I know it’s old news, but my internet plan came with free Prime, and I decided to give it a try, just holly hell, definitely deserving of the high praise.

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edawgfire · 6 years ago

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I just finished my 36th book of 2018. Wow it was heavy. We all hear these stories about girls being kidnapped and held for years before they escape. But what happens afterwards? I think this book does a pretty good job at explaining that. There was a scene about her recovery process that made me cry and reminded me I'm still healing too.

#survivor #baby doll #hollie overton

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snarktheater · 7 years ago

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Shadowhunters — Episode 2x17

Today on Shadowhunters…let's just get down to it, so I can quickly get to the end of this episode and have a rant about a sensitive topic with Shadowhunter culture that the books definitely had trouble handing and that the show is now fumbling on as well.

Since I'm liking the "put Simon's garbage subplot at the beginning of the post so it's out of the way first" method, I'll stick to it for the time being. Because yes, once again, Simon has a subplot that might as well be a different story that just happens to involve the same characters as the main story.

In today's episode: Simon's back in the friendzone, but with Maia this time! Yeah, remember how she helped him make it through Yom Kippur without eating any family members by posing as his girlfriend? I guess she fooled him too, and so, of course, he asks Maia out. At her workplace, because of course he does. Also, Luke sees Simon entering the bar an immediately guesses what's up, which is just…weird.

Anyway. Maia's not interested.

"That's really sweet of you, but…I can't. Busy." "I didn't give you a date yet."

Wait, no, I forgot, this is Shadowhunters, where no one's allowed to be honest about…anything. So instead she's actually interested but afraid to put herself out there in case Simon breaks her heart or some shit like that. Which we find out when Isabelle's having Max train with Simon (as a friendly but real vampire), because Isabelle, who has literally never met Maia, can somehow sense these things.

"I know Simon. And he's smart, sweet, caring…"

Questionable. Also questionable? Isabelle's argument when Maia says she's afraid to lose control around Simon. Specifically, how she makes that relate to her addiction, and then says this.

"[Losing control]'s a hell of a lot better than not taking a chance at all."

Actually, that's not even questionable. Let's go with a hard "no" on that one and call it a day.

But it works, and so Maia gives Simon a speech about being afraid to put herself out there, but she's ready to take a chance, as long as they take things slow. So…not only did Simon get what he wanted, he also had to put in zero work to get it? I get that the point was that he respected her choice and didn't want to go after another girl who wanted to just be friends, but still. It's a little bit weird to have Isabelle, out of the blue, go "you should totally date him" at a total stranger.

At the very least have Maia change her mind on her own based on something Simon does that proves he's worth taking a chance over (or that he's a safe choice, whichever fits his character more).

Well that was pleasantly short. Let's go over to the main plot, then. I'll skip over Clary's convenient meaningful dream and Jace waking her up while shirtless, because of course he does and of course he's shirtless. The point is, this conflict arises in their conversation.

"[Jonathan] was a child." "With demon blood. Don't forget that." "And no one but Valentine to teach him the difference between right and wrong."

Point being: nature versus nurture, Clary doesn't believe (or want to believe) that her brother is beyond redemption just for having demon blood, while Jace does. Strangely enough, Clary doesn't remind Jace that he used to think he had demon blood not that long ago, even though she did just that a few episodes ago. Maybe they only get to have that conversation once, even though Jace keeps using demon blood as an excuse to be belligerent all over the place?

More interestingly, I wonder if setting this up now will lead to any changes regarding the Endarkened when the story gets to them (assuming the show does, anyway). Will they still be treated as disposable mindless minions that you can kill with no ethical repercussions because they're "already dead"? Or…you know, will they do something more interesting?

Clary thinks to use Jocelyn's box of keepsakes to track down Jonathan, but it turns out that someone beat them to the chase.

And because this show thinks any lingering question will turn its audience away, we immediately see Jonathan holding his baby shoe, just in case you thought it might be something less obvious.

Also, he seems pretty distraught by the existence of those keepsakes.

"You said my mother didn't care about me."

Valentine dismisses it as Jocelyn caring for the son she never had, while she actively wanted to kill the demon-blooded Jonathan. I think this is meant to be perceived as Valentine manipulating him, but…it's also 100% true, you know. In the show continuity, Jocelyn tried to kill Jace, thinking he was her son.

That's good enough of an argument for Jonathan, who burns the shoe for symbolism, before they go back to vaguely alluding to their evil plan to be regarded as heroes by the Nephilim…somehow.

Meanwhile at the Institute, Max is apparently ready for his first mission on the field, even though he's like…ten, twelve, at the most. This is setup for another subplot in this episode, which I'll come back to at the end, but it's important here, because it means Max is present when Jace and Clary report to Alec that they couldn't find anything in the box of keepsakes they could use to track down Jonathan.

Luckily, it's fine, because if they can't find him, they can find what he wants instead! Specifically, the Mortal Mirror, now that Alec knows the Soul-Sword is in Jonathan's possession but that Clary deactivated it with her special runes, so Valentine's last recourse to wipe out all Downworlders is to summon Raziel instead.

"I thought that was just a legend." "All legends are true. […] The Angel will grant him one wish. Anything he wants." "The end of the Downworld as we know it."

I mean, that sounds like a lot of wild assumptions, but since they have no other real options, why not go for the lost third mystical object, right? Conveniently, we also see Valentine, who holds Sister Cleophas captive and wants her to reactivate the Soul-Sword. She can't, because Clary's runes are that overpowered, so he reaches the same conclusion as the protagonists did and sets out to find the Mirror.

Also, I should mention that this scene features Cleophas being injected with "min control serum", which Valentine…has, now? Was this established and I somehow forgot?

So he and Jonathan go to a bookshop held by a warlock, Elliot Nourse. He's an original character to the show, and I'm pretty sure he's a nod to book-Luke, because he pretty much matches his description (aside from, you know, being a warlock and not a werewolf). Not that that matters much, because he gets tortured and uses a spell to kill himself before Valentine can get anything out of him.

"I don't care what you do, I promised Jocelyn."

Yeah, he was safeguarding the mirror for Jocelyn's sake (because…she had it?). When Elliot dies, a sigil on his arm disappears, and Valentine somehow knows that that was a map to the Mirror and that it was passed down to another warlock? This episode is just full of people conveniently knowing stuff with no established reasons.

Speaking of which: Dot shows up at the Institute, and she has the mark on her arm now, and either she fills in Clary off-screen or Clary knew all about this somehow, because Clary then exposits to the others (and us) that indeed, the sigil is a map to the Mirror, and Elliot was a good friend of her mom and Clary knew him well.

Hey, guess what, show: maybe you'd have more time to establish these things if you didn't waste a bunch of your screen time on Simon's subplots.

Clary and Jace go investigate Elliot's shop first, and Sebastian shows up as well, which is totally not suspicious or anything. Clary and Jace quickly figure out that it was Jonathan's work, and start arguing again because Jace wants to kill him on sight.

"Remember what valentine made you do?" "I don't have demon blood."

That's not hypocritical or anything. Why are they making Jace take so many steps backwards in likability? First his pseudo-fascist bout, then being pushy with Clary as soon as she broke up with Simon, now this?

And yes, the irony that Jonathan is actually right there is not lost on me. Ha ha. So clever, show.

Meanwhile, Dot deciphers the map on her arm by comparing it to the ley lines in New York, and she and Alec argue about what will happen to the Mirror if they find it. Dot will help them, but she'll only trust Clary with the Mirror. And I like the sentiment, but will it really be her decision to make when it comes down to it? This is a genuine question.

At least Alec's smart enough not to let that get in the way of retrieving the Mirror at all. Even better, he sends Sebastian away when he tries to weasel his way into being part of Dot's escort, because he's the only person who didn't just instantly accept Sebastian.

Dot eventually narrows down to three possible locations, and Clary recognizes one of them as a park she used to go with Jocelyn to as a child.

"She hid it somewhere I remember, just in case. It's gotta be there."

I mean, at this point, why not more Mary Sue Guessing Powers, right?

Before they set out, Sebastian shows up in Clary's room to be a creep, which somehow gets Clary to open up about all her angst related to losing people she cares about and leads to Sebastian kissing her. For some reason, Clary mostly acts awkward about it, and not, you know, like he's a creep who showed up in her room to kiss her without her showing any sign of interest.

"I'll always be there for you, Clary. Whatever you need."

I mean, even without knowing that he's literal demon spawn (and her brother), how does that not sound like he's a stalker in the making?

He also steals a hair tie from her, but that's obviously to track her, so, you know. I'm not counting that. Besides it's kind of irrelevant by comparison.

So we get to our climax, in that Dot finds some kind of pocket dimension that holds the mirror (…possibly?) and retrieves it. But before they can leave, Jonathan shows up, in his true form. He takes out Jace immediately, while Dot does manage to get a spell in before he tosses her aside too. He won't hurt Clary, obviously, but he does threaten Jonathan's life in order to prevent her from running away with the Mirror.

But Clary, as we've mentioned, truly believes she can save him.

"Come with us. We can help you. Whatever Valentine told you, it's lies. Whatever happened in the past, whatever you've done, it doesn't matter. You're my family."

This makes Jonathan hesitate, long enough for Dot to open a Portal and Jace to force Clary through it, while Dot…stays behind to slow Jonathan down? I don't really get why she can't just take the Portal too. The show doesn't even act like she might die.

"She survived Valentine. She'll survive this."

Will she? How? You seem very confident about this.

Anyway. The Mirror (?) is a pocket mirror, and it shows Clary a vision of Lake Lyn, with two swords in it. I don't know if it means they'll steal reveal that Lake Lyn is the true mirror, or something else. I guess we'll just see eventually. Probably in the season finale.

Oh, and from that, Clary "deduces" that her dreams of Lake Lyn…aren't dreams.

"They're visions. I think they're some kind of message."

Considering everything that happened until now…sure, why not. This is as likely as anything else.

Before we part, there are two more subplots to talk about. First is Alec, who has very little to do since becoming head of the Institute. Well, remember how the Downworlder cabinet met without him at the Seelie Court? Well they're back, and the Seelie Queen wants war against the Clave, while Luke and Magnus are acting as moderate voices.

Well, that's not going to last. Remember how I mentioned that Cleophas is in this episode? Yeah, she also almost manages to break out of Valentine's…wherever he's holding her. She gets caught by Circle members, who are still around, I guess, but not before managing to steal a stele and send Luke a message about her situation. Including the fact that Valentine still has the Soul-Sword.

Which he shares with Magnus. Magnus, needless to say, is not happy that Alec kept that from him.

"From the day I met you, the one thing I knew I could count on was honesty."

And, you know, Alec does confess without even being prompted, but it's too little, too late.

"The Seelie Queen was right. We can't trust the Clave. […] We need to tell her."

Yeah…that doesn't strike me as such a great idea. On the other hand, I will commend the show for working the Seelie Queen more gradually as a villain, and setting up her joining forces with Sebastian better than the books did?

The other subplot is one I briefly mentioned already: Max being cleared for field operations. Well, mostly this subplot revolves around Isabelle, who really doesn't want him to go on the field, because it's dangerous enough on a regular basis, but with Valentine stirring up trouble, it's even worse, and she's just protective of her little brother. Reasonable enough, right?

And yet…everyone tries to convince her that it's okay. Which I can understand from, say, Alec, who's grown up in that same culture. But why is, say, Simon okay with this? Max is basically being turned into a child soldier here, and the show just wants me to nod along and go "Hmm, how unreasonable of Isabelle to be worried for his safety!" I'm pretty sure the correct stance on child soldiers is "don't do it", regardless of the surrounding culture or the existence of demons. I wasn't aware this was an ethical issue we were still debating?

You could make a case that the show is trying to argue that a well, if you squint a little, due to the episode cliffhanger. See, the episode ends with Max, who's been repeatedly telling everyone how good he is at everything, especially tracking people, revealing that he found one of Jonathan/Sebastian's hair on the box of Jocelyn's keepsakes. And he uses it to track it down to Sebastian. And he goes to confront him. Alone.

"You're him. You're Jonathan."

And…like…do Shadowhunters not learn about protocol? Asking for backup when dealing with an enemy who clearly outmatches you? Because if not, then why the fuck are you considered elite in the first place? And if so, then why is Max considered such a gret Shadowhunter?

But more importantly, I don't think this conclusion (which, again, is a cliffhanger, so maybe he's fine, regardless of his fate in the books) really shows a clear framing that Max shouldn't be a Shadowhunter. Every argument Isabelle has during the episode about Max is framed so that she appears wrong and overemotional, and ends on the note that he'll be fine. If it was just one scene, and then something bad does happen to Max in the same episode, and we dealt with the fallout in that episode, I could maybe let it slide. But multiple scenes, including from complete outsider to Nephilim culture Simon Lewis? No, I'm pretty sure the framing is slanted one way, and it's not the way that says child soldiers is wrong.

I know, I know. I've been abusing the phrase "child soldier" over the past few paragraphs. But it's because I cannot state enough how wrong this is and how appalled I am that not only is there just one character who has an issue with it, but that issue isn't even one of principles. As I said: I wasn't aware "child soldiers are wrong" was still a debate.

#A Dark Reflection #Hollie Overton #Jeffrey Hunt #shadowhunters #Todd Slavkin #Darren Swimmer #mcg #series #TV series #review #reviews #series review #series reviews #the shadowhunter chronicles #cassandra clare #st: shadowhunters s2

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