EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Synergy posted:

can someone share the story, assuming she's ok with that?

Google "medium vice petrofrac" to read noted journalist animethinktank's article on the subject

This. Plus, have you ever seen "Erin Brokovich"?
e: autocorrect suggests "Rostropovich"

MarianneSadd posted:

This is a really good write-up about The Life and Death of Emma Quangel. I wonder who wrote it? http://www.firstofthemonth.org/emma-quangels-spooks/

that's one of the worst things i've ever read

dipshit420 posted:

MarianneSadd posted:

This is a really good write-up about The Life and Death of Emma Quangel. I wonder who wrote it? http://www.firstofthemonth.org/emma-quangels-spooks/

that's one of the worst things i've ever read

to clarify, i think the crabapple's motivations and goals were bad and dumb. i support khamsek's efforts.

dipshit420 posted:

MarianneSadd posted:

This is a really good write-up about The Life and Death of Emma Quangel. I wonder who wrote it? http://www.firstofthemonth.org/emma-quangels-spooks/

that's one of the worst things i've ever read

that article was... Eclectic

In Berlin, I was once present at a gathering of Slavs. A burly guy who looked a little like Fassbinder came up to me and said, in a thick Russian accent, as if his syntax were reaching me through a primeval silence of forests and snowy steppes—the silence of communist poets who couldn’t take it anymore (Mayakovsky’s chronic silence, Crevel’s bisexual-Stalinist silence, Roque Dalton’s stoically screaming, unprosecuted silence, Paul Robeson’s lysergic silence after the CIA poisoned and electroshocked him, etc.)—, that he wanted to show me something. Ok, I said. He led me outside to a small balcony. I looked down into the courtyard below and then looked up at him. This is the end, I thought, convinced that my death would be like a montage from an Eisenstein film: stylized class gestures, over-rehearsed class rictuses, a Tsarist villain, his hapless victim. He must have sensed my fear because he smiled at me. Then his smile changed and he started tugging at his mustache, as if he were suffering from an incurable case of neuralgia or of psychopathy. Do you know who I am?, he asked me. No, I said. He lowered his eyes suggestively towards his mustache. I’m Nicholas II, he said. And in fact he did, at that moment, bear an uncanny resemblance to the last Tsar. I told him so, and he responded with one of those enigmatic, contemptuous half-smiles that are common among metaphysically corrupt Faustian-types, bourgeois Satanists, semi-professional mercenaries, semi-professional rapists, and other exhibitionists. Then he started rearranging his mustache and tugging violently at his goatee. I thought of three things while he was doing this: the guy’s insane, what the fuck am I doing out here, cruising with death?, and it takes him so long to move from one persona to another not because of any technical-aesthetic difficulties he’s having with his facial hair, but because for him this is a fucking séance. Well, and who am I now?, he asked. I don’t know I said, although I had an idea. Guess, he commanded. Felix Dzerzhinsky, I said. Alias Bloody Felix, founder of the Soviet secret police, he said, and his eyes lit up and he giggled like one of Bulgakov’s effeminate, middle-management devils, or like one of Gogol’s hysterics. Very good!, he shrieked, very good! One more?, he asked. Or am I frightening you? I wanted to say, No, you’re boring me. But I bit my lip and nodded in a way that he interpreted as permission to go on. This time he covered his beard with his left hand, and instead of forming his mustache into a calligraphic lowercase “w,” he let it sink morosely into an upside down “u.” In the middle of his latest pulled trick, a girl came out and put her arm around him. Greetings, comrade Gorky, she said. And to me, Is he bothering you with his Soviet facial hair routine? And then: he looks like Trotsky, she said, pointing at me but turning to the mustache artist, who was presumably her boyfriend. He let out a belching laugh and insisted that she take a picture of the two of us. I’ll do my Nicholas II, and you, Trotsky, why you’re such a spitting image of Lev Davidovich that you don’t have to do anything but smile, or, better yet, scowl. The girl took the picture. Are you a Trotskyite?, she asked me, seriously. No, I said. Well, then what are you?, she said. Wait, don’t tell me, I can tell by looking at you that you’re a Judeo-Bolshevik. A pause. Me, personally, I’m a Bolshevik, too, but a National Bolshevik (perhaps you’ve heard of Eduard Limonov, he’s like our David Lynch but he puts his money where his faggot mouth is). My boyfriend, he’s apolitical, isn’t that right? The guy shrugged. But he has reactionary tendencies, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Another girl, a blonde, came out onto the balcony. They spoke in Russian for awhile and then the second girl translated for me. I’m Polish and a left-wing monarchist, she said. Personally, I think the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were fifth columnist Bolshevik assholes, and they deserved what they got. Sometimes they talk shit about me for being Polish, but deep down we’re all pan-Slavists. The guy said something truculent about pan-Slavism in Russian, and then the girl started singing various ballads, folksongs, and Soviet-era anthems. This one’s from Uzbekistan, she’d say, and then sing for a minute. This one’s from the Caucasus region, this one’s from Estonia, etc. She said she was the lead singer in a Bulgarian reggae band that was getting pretty big in Berlin, in a niche way.

Several years later, or earlier, I don’t remember, a friend of mine who was a militant socialist had just finished his thesis defense and had gotten fucked up in celebration. He could barely keep his eyes open, I remember, but for the next three hours (interrupted by bong hits and bouts of uneasy sleep), he ranted, for a reason I can’t remember, about his passionate hatred of the Slavic race (racially, he was a Litvak Jew, his extended family a pile of bones in an Auschwitz exhibit and Celanian smoke). Not only did they fuck up communism for the world, but that crazy fascist Milošević destroyed the social-democratic left, gave them the ideal pretext to fall into the arms of NATO. Later, when he was sober, I asked him about his schizoid break, and he said, simply, I don’t know where that came from, honestly, but I stand by it. Fuck the Slavs.

As an aside, I’ve been told many times that I look like Trotsky. I don’t, or at least no more than any existentially undefeated young-ish black man looks like Huey Newton.

ok