#cosmic-rumpus

[8bitbobby]

Co-op with Coop

On April 1st, I had a visit with the benefactor of my longest friendship Mark Cooper or “Coop” as I called him back in the day. It was April Fools, but this is not a prank and the only fool was me for not snapping a picture to mark the occasion.  Coop and I met sometime around 1979 on the neighborhood streets of what was then called Lakeview Heights.  Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s was one of those amazing times that, looking back on it, I feel so fortunate to have been a part of.  Our upbringing in those days has become solidified in modern pop culture by way of memes, pictures and stories from those who survived that time.  Depictions of kids jumping their BMX bikes over a rickety, hand-made ramp while 6 or 7 hapless friends lay prone beside the warped, plywood slope-- like decommissioned school busses in an Evil Knievel motorcycle stunt-- resonate with our generation on a deep level.  How about the memories of what water tasted like coming out of a garden hose and the reminder to let the water run for a good 30 seconds on a hot day or else you got a mouthful of 90 degree plastic hose-flavored H2O? Mark lived one street over from me in those days and the shenanigans we found ourselves in never ended. We honestly didn’t stop from sun up to sun down (except for the occasional dinner bell or call of nature).  All the kids in the neighborhood had each other’s phone numbers memorized back then there were no smartphone contact pages.  The prefix was all the same and Mark’s # and mine were only 14 numbers apart. His number ended in 5-7-1-1 and mine in 5-7-2-5 and it wasn’t uncommon in those days to know your best friend’s number better than your own. From street hockey matches with anyone that walked by and wanted to join mid-game, to playing tag and kick-the-can in each other’s yards, knocking the pickets out of our fences when we used them as make-shift soccer nets, to pranking unsuspecting families with nicky nicky nine doors and running onto the road and mooning oncoming cars -- there was never a lack of crazy things for a bunch of 6-10 year olds to do back in those days.  We would ride our bikes everywhere we could and usually that was to the local corner store, Grant’s Market, or a little further down the road to the laundromat or video store.  Westside Video Classics was THE place to rent all the latest movies and games back in the day.  

If it wasn’t movies or wrestling, Coop and I bonded over hockey cards (playing scramble,  knock-downs and closeys), making comedy tapes on our cassette recorders (we thought we were a regular Bob & Doug McKenzie duo) and later on playing video games.  At my house I introduced him to the two full-sized arcade machines my dad had bought from a co-worker and put in our rumpus room as he liked to call it:  Super Soccer and Wild Cycle and then later games like Raid on Isram and Cosmic Cruncher on the Commodore Vic-20.  

At his house we played endless rounds of Ring King and Super Mario Bros. 2 on his NES as well as countless hours of board games like Crokinole, Rummoli and Crossbows & Catapults. We had the definitive 80s childhood: trick-or-treating together in our shared neighborhood for years at Halloween time, sleepovers almost every other weekend, birthday parties and endless summer nights of hi-jinx.  We shared in common younger siblings that tried to do everything we did at that time and rivalries with our respective kin that gave us even more to relate to.  Sometime in the early 80s, Coop tattooed the drywall on his bedroom wall, in permanent marker no less, with the inscription:  Best Friend Bobby since 1980.  An homage to a friendship that, at that time, was a few years on but looking back now has been a friendship that has endured nearly 45 years.   To take a page out of his playbook, I mocked my 7up sign to display the following:

I am getting away from my story. All of this to say that Mark came by to meet the family and check out my game room, but became quickly overwhelmed with it all.  He was audibly giggling from the moment I greeted him at the front door to the moment we made our way down to the ‘Arcade’ and then back up to the kitchen to sit and catch up.  His energy was infectious and I knew that we would likely not be doing a lot of gaming on this visit but rather getting reacquainted and spinning shared experiences from those good old neighborhood days.  

Fast forward a week and we got together again and this time we ended up spending a good hour re-living some of those nostalgic times down @ 8bit Bobby’s.  Coop’s one pre-visit request was that he wanted to play some Raid on Isram.  To make this possible, I had to hunt through various backups to find my rom files for the Vic-20 and then figure out how to interface it with my current Hyperspin setup on my M.A.M.E. Arcade machine.  After some tweaking I managed to get it setup and somewhat playable.  The game itself is nothing earth shattering and is essentially a watered-down clone of the popular game Scramble, but, to a couple of 40 somethings reliving the times when they were likely in the 10 and under category, it was pretty neat to play again.  The object of the game is literally survival. You shoot a laser cannon and drop bombs on enemy ground-to-air missiles and fuel refineries. It starts out scrolling left to right in a pretty wide open playfield but as the game wears on the air-to-ground missiles begin taking off and you begin to enter narrow tunnels with what can only be described as flying spiders coming at you.  You can shoot off the stalactites that make the caves a tight squeeze but if you are too busy contending with them you are sure to get hit by the unpredictable and weird trajectory of these squiggle-like arachnid creatures.  Raid on Isram is a “one and done” game meaning you have one life to get as far as you can and then that’s it.  No extra lives, no continues, nothing. THIS was the epitome of gaming back in the days before infinite lives, cheat codes and save states were a thing.  

From here we moved on to some co-op games starting with Golden Axe.  We got swiftly through the first two stages cracking heads and laying the boots to the little magic-stealing gnomes that appear between checkpoints only to have the game freeze without warning.  I have played through several of these games and never had this happen before. It was a definite headscratcher but we were undeterred.  We continued our co-operative game play with the Midway classic, Rampage.  Just like back in the old days when we used to stomp around the neighborhood, we joined forces to destroy buildings, smash tanks and defeat digitized army men as George and Ralph the giant, Kong-like Ape and Wolfman respectively.  We played through 19 “days” or cities and after each one we wondered how long the game went on for.  After a quick Wikipedia search it would appear that the game has 128 days that, when completed, repeat 5 more times. It was good to know that this was a game we were not likely to finish in one sitting. Maybe a future stream event or something?  Pictured below are our two protagonists: Coop & Bobby and in true fashion I am showing my age and lack of tech savviness by being unsure as to where I am supposed to be looking at the camera. I suppose a goofy picture is better than no picture at all.

This game room of mine and friends like Coop remind me how much of a role nostalgia plays in my life.  The way certain sights or sounds can just transport a person back in time.  I know we are not the same kids who hid in the willow trees on the neighbor’s property, cut through a field and hopped a fence into each others’ backyards with the ease and agility of an Olympic vaulter, and had water balloon fights while eating home-made popsicles to beat the summer heat, but for the hour or so that we connected tonight, we were transported back to a much simpler time. I leave you with the meme pasted below (which came up in conversation during his visit and I think really hits in the gut). Even though we can’t go back to that moment and give it the recognition and closure it deserved we can at least reminisce about what it was like just hanging out and teaming up against whatever was out there.  Co-op with Coop 4 EVA.  

[priokskfm]

#MixOfDay #Podacast #Radioshow #LiveDjset Wicked Woods 2022 Wicked Woods was nice. If you are also nice, this festy is for you! It was a serious honour rocking the sunrise on 'stacked Saturday' at the Unicorn Lounge, following SEVERAL of my favourite artists and biggest inspirations. I am so grateful for every beat, and it was def a highlight of my career bringing the sun up with so many smiles. Thank you to everyone that stayed up soooo late to rock out with me and for those that missed it - hope you guys dig my sunrise set from Wicked Woods 2022! Peace ~Funk Tracklist FunkinRight - Wicked Woods Intro Griz X The Sponges - Turn That Music Up (FR Edit) How we do a fake ID (FR Edit) FunkinRight - Tell You Friends You Love Them Father Funk - Boogie Nights (FR Edit) Shapeless & Casual Order - Funk Police (Extended) FunkinRight - Lava Nicky Genesis & Rumpus - You Betta (FR Dolla and Gold Edit) Cazztek Neon Steve - The Party Update (Extended Mix) POSIJ (Neon Steve Edit) (FR Re-edit) Shapeless & StiGy - Colors Tchami & Marten Hørger - The Calling (FR Edit) Arnold & Lane - I Wanna FXXX WBBL - Eat Yo Salad The Sponges - Gotta Move On (Extended Mix) CID - Carnaval de Paris (Extended Mix) LOUIS THE CHILD - KEEP ON MOVING SHORT EDIT Manic Focus, The Sponges - Brand New Funk (Original Mix) Askillz X 50 cent - Twang Bangers is High All the Time (FR Edit) Voodoo vibe X Snoop - Freshback Gin & Juice (FR Edit) Sunglasses (BadboE & B-Side Remix) Featurecast X Stickybuds - KPMpire (FR Edit) Ease Your Mind, Gangsta Nation (FR Edit) WBBL x Mobb Deep Shook You (FR Edit) Real Love Got Me Crazy Right Now (FR Edit) Bright Idea - Glitchn Aboot (FunkinRight Remix) The Funk Hunters x CMC & Silenta - Tribute (La Felix Remix) X Ray Ted - Get the Funk out the House (FR Edit) FunkinRight - Like Dis (Fractal Edit) Father Funk - Boogie Time Boydex & Stabfinger - Cosmic Funk (FR Edit) WBBL - Say my name (FR Edit) Mr Stabalina - In The Air (original mix) Boydex X FunkinRight - Funk Buddies ID FunkinRight X Boydex - Funk Buddies ID Super Freak (No Thanks Remix) WBBL - Kids (FR Edit) Jimi Needles - BYOB (FR Edit) Father Funk - Ray Charles (FR Hands in the air Edit) Jimi Needles -Hands in the Air (FR Edit) Featurecast - Shut You Down (FR Edit) WBBL - thinking of you (FR Edit) Jimi Needles - It's So Damn Funky Eric Prydz - Call On Me (Father Funk Remix) Jimi Needles - stay (FR Edit) Curtis Mayfield How You Want It (FR Edit) Defunk - Bones (FR Edit) SLY - Lean On (FR Edit) K Theory - Things I Like To Do GRiZ - For The Love ft. Talib Kweli GRiZ - Turnin’ ft. Orlando Napier Funk, Funky, DnB, 2022, "House ", "House Music", "Funky House", "Bass House", "Tech House", "Mid Tempo", "Funky Breaks", "Funky Glitch Hop", "Glitch Hop", "Funky Bass", "Drum and Bass", "Funky DnB", "Sunrise Set", "Dj Mix", "Wicked Woods Music Festival", "Wicked Woods"

[sciencestyled]

Hey, Science Nerds and Neverland Dreamers, Hold Onto Your Feathers Because We've Got the Scoop!

Hey there, you marvelous mavericks of the modern world and timeless dreamers of Neverland! Guess what? We've stumbled upon something so jaw-droppingly cool, it'll make the Lost Boys look like they're playing hopscotch in comparison. We're talking about a brilliantly bizarre mix-up of two things you thought lived in different universes: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and, wait for it… Peter Pan!

Yup, you read that right. Your favorite childhood legend, the one and only Peter Pan, is twisting through the loops and hoops of Einstein's brainy brouhaha like a true champ. So, buckle up, buttercups, because we’re about to send your minds soaring to heights even Tinker Bell hasn't reached!

First off, let's get something straight. Einstein – that genius with hair crazier than a March Hare's tea party – and Peter Pan, the chap who outflies his own shadow, are a duo you didn't know you needed until now. They're like peanut butter and jelly, but for your brain cells and imagination. Einstein throws in the hard-to-chew theories, and Peter Pan adds the fairy dust to make them fly right into your noggin.

Picture this: our boy Peter Pan playing ring-around-the-rosy with the concept of time dilation. Oh, the hilarity! Peter, with his never-ending supply of youthful sass, whizzing around in circles, proving time slows down when you’re zipping like a comet. It’s not just some fuddy-duddy theory; it’s real, and it's fabulous! It’s like when Peter’s off causing ruckus in Neverland, and back home, Wendy’s old and grey. Time flies when you're having fun, but it literally crawls when you're flying at light-speed.

But wait, there’s more! Ever thought about how space is as flexible as Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four? Einstein painted this picture, but it’s Peter Pan who’s bringing it to life. He says imagine space like a ginormous, cosmic rubber sheet (or a really big pirate flag, if that’s more your style). Heavy stuff like planets and stars plop onto it and make it sag – voilà, that’s gravity! Who knew the reason we’re not floating around aimlessly like Captain Hook's sense of decency is because of some cosmic saggy sheet?

And the pièce de résistance: E=mc²! In the colorful words of our fly-boy Peter, it's like turning cake (yum!) into a massive firework show – or in boring adult speak, mass turning into energy. It’s about transformations so mind-boggling, they’d turn even the sternest of Nannies into wide-eyed kids!

So, to all the smartypants and dreamers, this article is a twister game for your brain. Einstein's Theory of Relativity explained by Peter Pan isn't just some stuffy science lecture; it's a rollercoaster ride through Neverland, with loop-de-loops of time, space, and all that jazz. This article is a masterclass in making the complicated hilariously simple and fantastically real. You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll scratch your head, and you'll come out smarter than you went in – or at least with cooler party trivia.

We're telling you, folks, this isn't just an article; it's a fiesta of intellect and whimsy, a veritable feast for your curious souls! So, dive headfirst into this wild rumpus – where science meets storytelling, and Einstein meets Peter Pan – and let your mind be blown into a never-before-seen universe of awe and wonders! Because, in the end, isn't that what life's all about – finding the magic in the madness, the science in the story, and the Peter Pan in the physics? We thought so too. See you on the flip side, where the clocks tick backward, and the stars wink at us in secret understanding.

[oct2pus]

gift art of me fursona i recieved on Chimmy Day.

the top is from @sketchride

the bottom is from @cosmic-rumpus

bonus:

[nashtinav]

commission for @cosmic-rumpus whomst i had a delightful time drawing 8^)

[mi1k-wizard]

[last updated: 5/6/2018]

contact me through PM or email (vixanityxenn@gmail.com)

you pay first (through paypal, same as email)

i WILL do:

 gore, NSFW, nudity

furries, animals, robotic stuff (within reason)

body pillows

ask me and i will tell you 

i will do any character including ocs

be as specific as you want 🌻 (please though the more specific the better)

things to consider for detail:

poses (!!), colors, background (optional), clothes, body type, face shape, and any visual references you have!

any donations and tips are super appreciated ! (paypal same as email)

thank you guys a ton <3

[salsaccino]

Run to your wife, dear Kanaya

( @cosmic-rumpus )

[righca]

Shit Cosmic-Rumpus says.

"You look like a soggy tree branch"

[dustedmagazine]

Bitchin Bajas — Switched on Ra (Drag City)

Photo by Katoman

Switched On Ra by Bitchin Bajas

Around the time that Bitchin Bajas included a cover of “Angels and Demons at Play” on Bitchin Fresh, Cooper Crain told Brown Noise Unit about his deep connection to the Arkestra’s work, that crystalized when he booked a show for the band in the mid-2010s. “I was in the sound booth, and I was so happy, but it was so emotional. And then I got super into that song. One day before we went out on tour, I just started playing the bassline on the organ, and Rob — he comes from a jazz background — knew what I was playing, and just joined in. And man, it was fun!”

The pairing makes sense in a lot of ways. Both bands have a connection to the cosmic. Both use improvisation to build ecstatic, communal soundscapes. Both toy with futurism, imagining sonic worlds that don’t fully exist until they stumble on them. And both understand that homage doesn’t necessarily mean copying. Whether it’s Sun Ra putting its own mark on Disney tunes or Bitchin Bajas covering early Arkestra jams, the interpretations are free and open-ended. Switched on Ra, a cassette release of vintage synth reimaginations of selections from the Arkestra’s catalogue, respects the originals enough not to try to reproduce them.

To begin with there’s instrumentation. The Arkestra is, in many ways, a traditionally structured big band, grounded by an exceptional rhythm section, but with the melody carried most often by saxophone, but sometimes also brass and piano and vocals. To make Switched on Ra, Bitchin Bajas used 19 different types of keyboards and basically nothing else. Even the flutes and other woodwinds that frequently popped up in previous Bitchin Bajas were left in their cases. So, while the originals sweat and swagger with the friction of live jazz improvisation—scratchy bass lines, rambunctious drums, wild careening reed melodies, the organic, gutsy singing of June Tyson—Bitchin Bajas’ versions have a chilled, distanced, synthetic quality, which owes as much to Wendy Carlos as to the Arkestra itself.

So, while Ra’s version of “Space Is the Place” out and out swings, with wild blasts of saxophone and heated, joyful vocal call and response, the Bajas' take is like a lucid dream, wreathed in drone and speaking in the clear, fluid tones of analogue synth. It’s the same melody distilled into a pristine electronic language, without the grooving rumpus of the Sun Ra cut. “Call for All Demons,” a cut from the mid-1960s New Horizon album, is likewise rooted in big band swing, riding a spiked and rhythmic interchange between bass, drums and piano in antic motion, as more fluid horn lines arc over in melodic complement. Bitchin Bajas recreate the tune with intricate malleted percussion sounds that fit together like a staccato 3D puzzle. The horn bits are re-heard as wobbly, space-age surges of synthesizer. It’s quite a startling reimagination, faithful in its way, but utterly different, with a retrofuturistic sheen. In “Outer Spaceways Incorporate,” June Tyson’s growling, wailing vocals are transformed into a lovely, not-quite-human voice, an android dream of the past’s idea of the future.

In the end, Switched on Ra is the best kind of tribute, demonstrating a fundamental grasp of the original material but taking it in an entirely different direction. The Arkestra itself does this all the time, reinterpreting its older charts in ways that reflect a shifting ensemble and changing moods and inputs and environments, so why not Bitchin Bajas, too? And also, not to be underestimated, it’s god-damned beautiful wherever it comes from and wherever it goes.

Jennifer Kelly

[If you can’t get enough of Sun Ra, check out our Listening Post from October 2020.]

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Megan Fernandes, Author of Good Boys

Megan Fernandes is a writer and academic living in New York City. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015) and the new book of poems, Good Boys (published by Tin House). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, the Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She is a poetry reader for The Rumpus and an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She reads from her new book Good Boys with special guests at City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, February 25th.

***

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Megan Fernandes: Of all the places I’m reading this Spring (and it’s probably not politic to say this), I am most excited to read at City Lights. I’ve never been, but I understood at a very young age that the bookstore symbolized possibility, spontaneity, digression, lostness, community, etc. As a teenager, I read a lot of Beat literature, my favorites being Dharma Bums, In the Night Café, and everything Ginsberg. I was compelled by their portraits of America’s expansiveness. And I also just think as an immigrant kid not born in the USA, the Beats gave me some sense of American geography. I went to Colorado for the first time last year and I had this memory of my first impression of Colorado as a place described in On the Road. When traveling across the country, I often have Ferlinghetti’s feverish, twitchy, carnivalesque poetics in my head. I also think in this indirect way, Beat literature shaped some of my thoughts around feminist thinking as I was conscious of my orientation as outside certain privileges of the “male, womanizing adventurer” often romanticized in Beat lit. I had to interrogate what it meant to feel intimacies with Ginsberg and Duncan who were destabilizing masculinities and cultural logics of hate. 

And so what I learned from City Lights and Beat lit is really something about the relationship between myth-making and counter-culture communities. I’m understanding the truly expansive network of the movement in so much more detail right now while reading an advanced copy of a fabulous new book called The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto. 

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a book called Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, co-written by Dapper Dan himself and my good friend, Mikael Awake. It’s a history of Dapper Dan’s iconic work in fashion, of course, while being really intimate. And it’s just as much a history of his family’s internal dynamics and, through his family, New York City at large. In particular, 1970’s NYC is so vividly, brilliantly wrought in this book.

There’s this one section where Dap is at Iona College at a lecture on protohistory and the professor, a Czech immigrant, tells the class that “In order for man to have survived during those ancient times… he must have had powers that he doesn’t have now. The only people that could possibly still have these powers today are the black and brown people on the planet” and when Dap hears this, he is transfixed. He says: “This is one of the most esteemed scholars at Iona College telling a packed lecture hall that black and brown people were the only ones on the planet who still had spiritual powers. How come this was my first time hearing about that? I looked around. I was the only black student in the class. I wasn’t tired anymore. He had my full attention… I said to myself, This is what I need to know. This is how I need to formulate myself.” I’m loving how the book captures these intense moments of transformation. I love that word choice: formulate. What poetic agency is modeled in that word? I needed that word the moment I read it. 

Recently, I’ve also read Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories and Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out. Samiya wrote this legitimately weird and imaginative book that feels like it’s made out of the time-space continuum. Some cosmic materiality is really showing up in that book. I remember this line: “A body. A zoo. A lovely savannah. Walls of clear, clean glass” and I’m just on a ride with the musicality of her shifting assonance. Plus, I know that writers like June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara are operating influences/specters of the book and you can feel that energy. Edgar’s book is more narrative and quieter, but so devastating. I sort of get what makes his speakers tenderize if that makes sense. I think it’s the same phenomena that tenderizes me, too.

Some of my favorite novels of recent years includes A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims, The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch, Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi, and very recently, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

What book or writer do you always find yourself recommending?

I think Jean Toomer’s Cane is the most beautiful book of the 20th century. I remember just being blown away by its call and response, the repeating imagery of sun and smoke and pines. That book is so stunning. Other astounding work that I always recommend includes Mebvh McGuckian’s Captain Lavender, Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Evie Shockley’s The New Black, Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Eleni Sikelianos’ Body Clock, Jorie Graham’s The Errancy, Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, and Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann’s translations of Rilke. Those are my hard-hitters. Those books are why I became a poet. 

What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?

You know, I collected poems while I was writing and editing this book. And I think those specific poems created a kind of constellation around me, almost protective, that kept me writing. Some of those poems include “The Long Recovery” by Ellen Bass, “A Matter of Balance,” by Evie Shockley, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I am Not Seaworthy” by Toni Morrison, “Becoming Regardless” by Jack Spicer, “A New Bride Almost Visible in Latin” by Jack Gilbert, “To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks and many, many others. Definitely O’Hara as well. He never leaves me. The most important poem of that little self-curated archive is Frank Bidart’s “Visions at 74” where he writes: “To love existence / is to love what is indifferent to you.” I remember reading that line and just losing it. I have been guided by so much of Bidart. And maybe my book is a little bit about how to sustain rage in the face of that which is indifferent to you, what cannot love you (both personally and abstractly). How do you sustain rage so as to not fall into despair?

I also listened to a variety of music while writing and editing. A mix between contemporary sad kid hip-hop, old school jazz and blues, gospel, 80’s bands, pop culture queens, 1970’s hypnotic modal vamp, classical Spanish guitar, electronic pop, really pretty varied. A few names that come to mind: KOTA the Friend, NoName, Vince Staples, Travis Scott, Miles Davis Quintet, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, The Knocks, Solange, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Big Mama Thornton, Miriam Makeba, Kamasi Washington, Thompson Twins, Misfits, Bowie, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, Cher, Whitney Houston, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Memphis Slim, Dinah Washington, Alberto Iglesias, Gustavo Santaolalla, Holychild, Blood Orange, etc.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My grandpa played violin on a ship that sailed between Tanga, Tanzania and Goa, India. I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my dad was sixteen, but I always thought about what that journey might have looked and felt like, its many hardships, but also the wonder of gazing out at the sea playing strings. For that reason, I’d love to open a bookstore that focused specifically on Indian Ocean diaspora and sold books exclusively by authors working, uncovering, or investigating the literature of that oceanic rim. I think there is something rich in thinking about books not necessarily focused on nation-statehood but thinking more about a kind of social-imaginary with a literature that is messy in its conceptualization and crosses, migrates, misses, and mythologizes across many cultures over generations. You could have sections on food, underwater exploration, piracy, long-distance intimacy, trade routes, empire, transnational feminism. I like the idea of a bookstore that is anti-genre and instead, organized by associative thinking and imagination. It would be a logistical nightmare. You would never find what you were looking for, but you might find something you didn’t know existed.

So yes, I’d vote for a little homegrown network of bookstores in India, East Africa, and actually, maybe one of them in Lisbon which is a city that has a long (and problematic) history with the Indian Ocean. I’ve spent a lot of time in Lisbon the past eight years of my life, spending time visiting family and researching the history of the Portuguese empire especially as it relates to my family history (my folks are third generation East African Portuguese colonized Indians). I have a lot of conflicting homelands which is a way of saying that there are times when I feel like I have nothing but a rootless present. That’s something I investigate in my work, that weird (a)temporality. And I’m drawn to the particular light of Lisbon which is quite unusual. I’d call the bookstore “Malaika” which means “Angel” in Swahili and is the favorite folk song of my parents who grew up in Tanzania. I like the idea of a bookstore in Lisbon with the name in Swahili run by a Goan-Canadian-American woman. That’s the world I grew up in… one of multiplicities. 

[yespoetry]

Sarah Lyn Rogers: Guided Meditation

Guided Meditation with Dead Musician

 Okay, close your eyes, deep breath.

As if it wasn’t enough, the years

spent rotating the same five CDs

feeling some resonance beyond

 the actual notes, the nimble-

fingered descants over bass line

melodies that thrummed through

your teenage body, soundtrack

 of your first car, the red one

low to the ground and three

years older than your own

shy self, girl driving alone

 at night to and from the boys

who didn’t quite know you,

or friends who wanted to

but didn’t either, not that

 you let them. Felt like no one

but the singer with spiderweb-

thin delivery could understand

a constant low-level sadness

 rising ecstatically to the top

of your consciousness with certain

chord changes. This is what my soul

sounds like, you were embarrassed

 to think, but thought anyway, for he

who felt kindred but had died

six months before you’d heard

of him. All anyone can ever

 think to say is R.I.P. in comments

under videos and song lyrics.

R.I.P., R.I.P., as though death

is what he is.

 Maybe they can’t see themselves

in the scenes, sitting alone

in a dim bar, walking alone

to a fight, waiting alone for a train

 alone alone often alone but resonant

beyond physical space, beyond his

human body—

 the way you are now

breathing, listening, existing

 inside yourself and also

somewhere with no name.

 This

is where we meet.

Guided Meditation with Mean Voice

 Oh, so we’re doing this again.

 Okay, breathe in, close your eyes,

you fucking loser, what makes

you think you deserve any time,

 always behind in the mornings,

 misplaced your keys, can’t find

the shoes you wanted, O

enlightened being, that’s rich.

 The problem is you, the part

that covets self-destruction

despite your stated intentions—

 isn’t that right? Some defect,

 admit it, desire for failure,

the reason your brain races

and you phone-scroll aimless

 the reason your body doesn’t want

 to wake before noon, or fall to sleep

before two. If you were good, couldn’t

you handle all you were handed,

 keep your home spotless clean,

call everyone who might be lonely?

Thicken your skin, practice old etiquette,

 never need? Why can’t you measure up

 to what they want? Everyone’s a critic

though none so terrible

as this insistent, private hissing.

Guided Meditation with Inner Child

 She’s you, but small, little sprout

ponytail, bare feet, crooked grin

scoopable, mischievous, one eye

closing slightly on the side that

smiles bigger than the other. You

would never say such harsh words

to her, never push her to exhaustion

or starvation, never sacrifice her

to save face. She gets restless

she needs quiet, she needs time

alone to tinker, to doodle

to recharge. She needs water

a nap, an afternoon snack.

She wants to climb a tree

concoct a potion, throw ashes

in the air like blasts of smoke.

She needs to cry sometimes

and chase the cats. She needs

to know there’s nothing to prove

no formula that means now she’s

allowed. Hold her and you’ll feel it.

Guided Meditation with Gramps

 Close your eyes and there he is, alive

but younger than you knew him, hair

still brown, rocking that unibrow.

He carries a walking stick, because

he always did. You are hunting

for arrowheads in Florida’s soft

soil, eyes alert for snakes and when

you see one, you both jump over

like in the story from when he was

four years old and knew they were

bad news, inherited the warning

from a long line of primates

including your great-grandmother,

who trusted Stalin but not modern

medicine. Battle-axe who made him.

When you look again, he is younger

still, and shoeless, with a rifle

on his back and two hunting dogs,

Betty Boop Beagle and Terry.

You are walking to the tin shacks

in the woods where he was raised.

Maybe you walk along a river

or stream, who knows what kinds

of trees are there, just fill in

with your imagination. Before

the shacks, there’s a dirt path,

forked, a literal crossroad. This

is where he’ll leave you. Ask anything

you think he’ll be able to tell.

Sarah Lyn Rogers is an NYC-based writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the editorial assistant for Soft Skull Press, a contributing editor for Catapult, and was formerly the fiction editor for The Rumpus. She is the author of Inevitable What, a poetry chapbook focused on magic and rituals, and is seeking a home for Cosmic Tantrum, a full-length poetry collection. For more of her work, visit sarahlynrogers.com.

[our-minds-betray-us]

@cosmic-rumpus your stream is beautiful 

[wilma-flintstones-mother]

In Memorium of ALL that was lost 17 years ago and Also Intentionally Slotted Here This Evening Most Thoughtfully to Act as Motivational Fuel for the Fires that will Rage from Within the Very Core of the hearts and minds and conscience of the soon-to-be in Revolt citizenry of these United States of America in one Final, bloody, intense and all too necessary Shoot-em-up Stand-Off to the death against the Evil Spectres of World Domination and specifically to thwart and completely overpower them before they are able to initiate the communications, media, finances, military, government shutdown and beginning of an unspeakably brutal, inhumane, uber-violent and nightmarish new era of civil war, revolution, mass execution, starvation and instantaneously unleash mass catastrophic casualties not only to the populace but also to the environment, the animal kingdom in it’s entirety, the planned destruction of entire continents through previously un-imagined and practically instantaneous destruction of the planet’s protective ozone layer, resulting in the immediate genocide of all of Earth’s indigenous carbon-based life, it’s plentiful flora, wide variety of fauna and also contaminate what hadn’t already evaporated upon impact the small remaining amounts of precious life-sustaining water, through their perfected secret mastery of previously undiscovered directed energy weaponry that is some form of combined nuclear energy, microwave technology, anti-gravitational frequencies, pure dark anti-matter (!!!seriously!!!NO SHIT!!!), weather, climate and tectonic plate manipulated modification turned up to astronomically dangerous, unstable and very likely mass extinction level event status catastrophic disasters and result in essentially prematurely creating and ejaculating another end of the world as we know it holocaust to end all previous civilizations falls and final death knells (but this time, intentionally caused by the control-freakish political, financial, industrial and military combined governing lords over mankind itself) all inclusive planetary die-off and single, solitary jumping off and into the bottomless abyss, resulting in a.) spill over into the pan-dimensional multiverse (which WAS previously thought to have been theoretically an absolute impossibility!) into the ninth, tenth and twelfth dimensions, respectively, but simultaneously also extinguishing out every last vestige of life-force on the planet in less than a tenth of a second and managed to obliterate each and every one of us from a dimension of sight, sound and mind directly into a (imminently far, far greater than simply a mere) other dimensional plane, consisting of layer upon layer upon layer (infinitude) of vehemently dangerous couplings of essentially MATTER  and  ANTI-MATTER  coming in and back out of direct contact with one another, frequently, shockingly silently co-mingling into and between and surrounding and even bridging and exchanging protons and atoms and black matter as well as sub-atomic particles and potentially even communications, emotions, entanglements, relationships, births, deaths, momentary sharing and exchanging  one another’s very fundamental opposite identities and dimensional realities and physics, with the identifying forces of one’s positive matter actually momentarily embracing and becoming the other’s negative anti-matter in a unproven but most undeniably sexual and familiarly interpersonal most extremely noticeably peculiar and identifiable fashion of cosmic similitude and the commonly shared consciousness of which we all are, have been or one day will be a consciously living, breathing and existing extension of and only temporarily branched out from, as we and every other pattern of energy and cosmic memory perpetually re-emerge from as brand new energy patterns of a dangerously unstable and eventually formidably destructive and destroying on all levels of all layers of all dimensions and each and every one of the millions of universes, galaxies, solar systems, planets, continents, countries, cities, neighborhoods, square blocks, autonomous buildings and personal dwellings, individual living spaces with identifying names defining what activity or necessity of everyday life is executed within each specified room and it’s functional purpose, personal effects, family heirlooms, furniture, keepsakes, entertainments, elemental nourishment preparatory appliances and implements,unique individual life forms laying in bed, tossing and turning back and forth, unable to achieve sound sleep, the myriad cacophony of inner voices, fleeting thoughts, obsessions, scheduling of things to accomplish the following day, what they were going to wear, weather or not so-and-so was interested in dating them, worrying that their car might break down again and having to shell out another $500 out of their laughably inconsequential savings account, the linear dream state of human beings, as it continues to develop and move forward and shift from reality to reality and from moment to moment, never actually ceasing in it’s eternal clockworks, weather the unconscious host dreamer is currently wide awake and existing, thinking, acting and forgetting all about what they had experienced within it’s hyper-reality surrealism and meditative, curative phantasmagoria just a few hours previously when they were still fully immersed in it’s calm and collected, REM-activated trappings and grasp, and even then, the dream they had suddenly woken up from unexpectedly as their alarm clock went off at 8:30 am sharp and they ever so slowly, lackadaisically began to forget all about the wild, memourable, erotic, funny, exciting, evocative dream they had been enjoying just prior to waking up, in which they even got to hang out and experience many different kinds of abstractly disjointed variations and totally irrational and illogical combinations of being in their parent’s house/but also at Disneyland/which was also a Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant/and the hospital corridors you would endless walk through at a time when your grandmother was a patient and died there/which was also your place of employment (probably several jobs ago, the one you really liked but that you really did self-sabotage your being  able to remain at) / which also had a little hidden rumpus room on the other side of the wall from your high school cafeteria, where you and another kid you had a crush on disappeared into so you could smoke a bowl together and then engage in sloppy, failed attempt at performing oral sex upon/which also had a really cool roller coaster right outside the main entrance that you could ride for free/ that would also just so happen to make a stop halfway through just outside of your very own bedroom door/ just as you hear the voice of your little brother who died when he was 10 calling your name as if he were lost somewhere and couldn’t find his way/but that’s stupid, because I KNOW and I REMEMBER that HE DIED YEARS AGO, but I’m glad he’s home and I wonder if he’ll want to go see STAR WARS with me and Jill and Kessie later on tonight at the Rialto in South Pas, that is, if I we can find each other... I hope he doesn’t get too scared/so just as you open your bedroom door and are about to walk in/suddenly you are startled by an annoying loud buzz which you can’t comprehend at first but then you/suddenly open up your sleepy eyes and it’s your alarm clock right on buzz-killing schedule as always, and your bedroom ceiling is awash in vibrant hues of yellowish-orange morning sunlight and all of that provocative zaniness was all just a dream...as always....except you never realize it fully until you have wake up and have emerged out of it’s hypnotic and compelling desire-answering and mood-fulfilling magick theatre-isms, it’s so obvious now that that was all only a dream, even though I remember dreaming that I knew it was all just a dream, even though it always more-than suffices as an even-better alternative to waking life and this reality in lieu of living in it... and those faceless character-actor-ish phantasms who you were never privy to the common knowledge of realizing or even imagining that those people and those images of people you know and knew in real waking life actually do just continue on about within the reality and time frame and space and time curvature of which their usually entertaining, carefree, monstrous hybrid of all things, real, imaginary, past, present and future, entertainment fiction real life trauma as experienced from the top hill of a b&w animated roller coaster originally drawn way back in the late 1920′s just as it begins to spill over the rather substantial incline just as the maximum momentum and locomotion has achieved it’s hand-drawn cell-animated maximum velocity, you notice the entire back half of the train of cars is literally lifting feet above the noisy pencil-drawn wooden tracks they’re allegedly connected to, a few of the people in the last two cars even fly out of their seats at the top of the hill, safely settling back into their chosen seats on the coaster by the time it reaches the bottom of the first hill.... the Fleischer Brothers ain’t got nothin’ on the power and limitless freedom of movement, imagination, unlikelihood, a human animals natural-born connected-ness with the psychic and telekinetic energies, patterns and the Earthen natural resources of magnetism and magnitude, unyielding and unrecoverable decimation, the violently opposing layers and volumes and channels and dimensions and and conflicting reams of liquid space, psychic vibratory beings consisting of nothing but pure energy, shadow and darkness ; abject, complete and unimaginable total non-existence, sequencing which would begin the intention of their callously chickenshit and much, much too prematurely arriving at that moment to end all other moments throughout the nights of time, as they safely secure themselves and their self-importance and their loved ones, pets, favourite records, movies and books, computers and internet connectivity, porn, King James versions of the Bible, all of their very  favourite processed, GMO and cloned foodstuffs, wellspring library of alcohols, sodas, sundry recreational drugs, nibbles, snacks, more cases of bottled water than anyone has ever seen in reality EVER and aperitifs... But they also DIDN’T forget to bring along all of their unnecessary baggage and dirty laundry and bad, bad, bad, bad, and I’m talking... fucking detestable, shameful-ass as-a-mother-fucker bad-bad-ass karma (that is so sullied and so soiled and so unrecognizable as still actually being legally able to be referred to tastefully and realistically as `karma’) Oh, as well as their wealth of compassionate and trustworthy and still gainfully much, much better, handsomer and more worthy, deserving and overall just plain better than you, and all of the expected limited intelligence and tunnel vision perceptions, ever having been able to just kick the fuck back worry-free and enjoy life, goddammit, being born into old, white, American money and profitably living his life day to day, year to year, lost decade to shitty new world-ordered decade, far too privileged for far too long and all the while having succeeded in incontestably lying, deceiving, murdering, littering, poisoning, manipulating, cheating, raping, pillaging, warring, creating unnecessary tensions and divisions out of friends and neighbours, guilty by treason for a lifetime consisting of literally absolute and complete incompetency, crimes against humanity coupled with a competently inhumane disregard for any and all creatures and beings and families and communities, ever able to not just survive but perpetrate every last conceivable attribute of nihilism, misanthropy, xenophobia, sexism, conservative republicanism, needlessly controlling power freak and (just short of legally being able to qualify as tangibly having lived your life and carried out your position of power over all others) just two-steps short of having followed closely in the same footsteps as Hitler, Mussolini, the George W. Bush Dynasty and Justin Bieber himself... having acted upon on all of the very worst and lowest common denominational rhetoric, politics of never more than dirty fucking pool at it’s very lowest n-word notches and, now, safely watching the pandemonium and fiery, avalanche of unprecedented 9.4 earthquakes, tsunami that stay quite far inland wracking up even more unbelievable devastation for weeks at a time, volcanic overflows overtake the Hawaiian island which are now nothing but molten lava and bodies and beaches covered in sizzling, razor-sharp newly born land, otherwise, the rest of the whole of the planet’s surface remains awash in uncontrollable fiery flames that give any imaginings of Hell a sincere run for it’s money, all of the major continents, now broken up and in disarray and many no longer connected to any other large square mile footage of land any longer quickly become one endless, suffocating, inferno of unprecedented loss of resources, life, and destruction so thorough in it’s willful desire of finally claiming and bringing to a halt the previous relative peace, tranquility and beauty of all that had been and thrived there for so long, 200 mph winds signalling the arrival of onslaughts of level 5 hurricanes, tornadoes and the tallest, most ominous and terrifying sight of 300 foot tall rogue tidal waves approaching, one after the other after the other, wiping out any and all previous beach and harbour communities ;  scary, violent new chunks of Earth shooting up from far beneath the surface, destroying everything in it’s wake and ripping-to-shreds the very land masses underneath our feet which had been home to our beloved communities, estuaries, park lands, national monuments, farm lands. rivers, forests, family homesteads, hills and valleys ;  molten lava spewing forth robustly, shooting fiery liquid fumes into the air three miles up and then landing hundreds of miles away, volcanic rock, magma, tectonic plates, mountains, hills, valleys, grasslands, rain forests, beaches, deserts, all cities of the world finally united in one overwhelmingly epic fireball burning every last shelter, building and domicile unmercifully to the ground - As the still-believing-themselves-to-be ever-privileged, special, deserving and just higher-class one per-centers, who just minutes previously inherited the title of  and factually became THE REPRESENTATIVE ENTIRETY OF HUMAN BEINGS ALIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH (or more accurately, deep within the labyrinthine caves and tunnelled out miles and miles of underground civilized word, accommodations, diversionary things like big slides, swings, swimming pools and mineral springs, bowling alleys and skating rinks, exacting replicas of their favourite four star eateries of the previous civilized world, subterranean jungles, arboretums and gardens, a n amusement park with all of the most insane and exciting thrill rides and roller coasters anybody could ever wish for,  exacting duplicate versions (all stolen, of course) from Disneyland’s Matterhorn, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Enchanted Tiki Room and Jungle Cruise rides (poetically, they DID have the taste and intuition to not consider also having their own water flume it’s a small world ride, too!  I mean... that was the VERY LEAST they could have NOT done!) Anyway, with them all together having drinks and a small, five-course light luncheon being served to them by their staff (they DID allow a hundred or so select few of the rest of us to survive the pandemic `natural’ wave of cataclysmic destruction that the Earth and it’s surface and it’s 99% of the rest of the civilized populace, as we knew it, had suffered) and they were all assembled in their single most comfortable, cushy, oversized and simply plush movie theatre/dinner theatre/five star restaurant/full bar and pharmaceutical store/hamburger stand/coffee house/art gallery/television stations and they all watched over CCTV which played out, mechanically filming and panning back and forth and then shifting to another CCTV location and the not-so-surprisingly total loss and unrecognizable current appearance of many previously magnificently beautiful famous and beloved locations of historical and personal significance, all of the destruction and decimation on the planets surface miles above them playing out unashamedly just as unapologetically as it had happened in the first place, for all of them to see with their own eyes the trivial, trifling, megalomaniac spoiled conservative republican, unnecessarily one-sided results of their well-planned escape and future subterranean survivalist underground civilization and continuation of the human animal (or, more accurately, of the most minutely small, inconsequential, minor, petty, self-obsessed and inbred of any and all possible cliques of individuals who might ever have possibly been the few select `lucky ones’ to have actually been the only living representatives of all human life on the planet, 99% of which had just recently been violently killed in one freakish manner due to one or another of the extinction level event cataclysmic disasters that had simultaneously murdered off the entire planet itself!  They sat in surprising silence as they interestingly took in all of the devastation they witnessed live on the very large 70mm cinerama dome-like vinyl motion picture screen and, for the very first time, I believe it may have actually been the single only time ever that a group of fascistic, right wing republican conservative born again Christians ever sat together in such an immense and comfortable entertainment center, and did not open their retarded mouths to say not one fucking snide little comment about all of those unlucky one’s above who had just perished...  I believe that even if it may just have been a trick of the light or something, that I may possibly have just witnessed a conservative republican shedding a tear or two over somebody who was neither himself, a member of his family and actually who had been one of those bleeding-heart liberal democrats who ruined our country so thoroughly and ran that shit right into the ground before we did the right thing and saw to it that they finally got WTF they deserved, those stupid fucking N-word  M*%%# F&@#%$......

[mi1k-wizard]

cosmic-rumpus --> mi1k-wizard🌱

i know i have been incredibly inactive for these past couple months, and i thank you all for sticking around to see whats up 💕

i wanted to come back with an announcement that the focus of this blog will be shifting to my personal art rather than basely fanart. i have so much love for my past work and experiences ive had as a digital artist; it has brought me nothing but friends, commission work, and followers that appreciate what i love to do!

but as i head into this new phase in my life i want to let you all know that i am still creating, but rather the content of my art has changed. so, since i still have a large following on this platform, i want to best reflect who i am today and what ive been creating in my life.

so heres the plan:

1. i was formally known as cosmic-rumpus, but ive been using mi1k-wizard as a username on other platforms so i feel it would fit to change my tumblr url. sorry for any confusion! (theres a 1 for an l in there bc milk-wizard was taken)

2. i have a new redbubble!  (<-- click there to see it) it features a lot of my art. go ahead and check it out! i could use all the support as a broke college student. i will be updating it regularly

3. i will no longer be taking commissions. while i cherish the opportunities ive gotten through doing commission work, overall it has gotten to a point where it is added stress to my life. creating art is something i love to do, and i wish to keep it that way!

thank you all for everything!!

~charlie

[tjb0607]

icon change!

featuring this jade from @cosmic-rumpus​!

old icon was this

[karapom]

thanks to @cosmic-rumpus for the picture at the bottom of my blog