FOR SOME reason, impenetrable to any German leftist, there seems to be the strange US-American liberal assumption that Germany is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-sipping liberal paradise, where we hug refugees all the day, care for mother nature, and organize a perfect ‘socialist’ (in the liberal use of the term, meaning social-democratic) society, and with the guidance of a dear and democratic government, we care for our people and the world. While it will forever be a mystery for me how anyone could believe this in the first place, I am going to debunk this assumption in this article. My wager is that, by observing the current situation in Germany, we might find tendencies and latencies that elide developments within capitalist realism that are elsewhere still not fully feasible.
Read MoreYour Face
JAMES HAD a problem. He had no face.
Actually, he had a face and he knew he had a face. He could see it in the mirror. Eyes, nose and mouth were there where they were supposed to be; on the front of his head. He could see it but nobody else could. They saw through his face, around his face and everything but his face. There was nothing there, just visual ambience.
Read MoreIrrealist Worker Survey RESPONSES
In December 2019 the Born Again Labor Museum and Locust Review issued our first “Irrealist Worker Survey” as part of our quixotic attempt to map the gravedigger’s multiverse. A selection of responses from you — our dear comrade readers — along with the survey questions, as printed in Locust #2, is posted here.
Read Morebalmletter #1
Balmletter is the quarterly newsletter of the Born Again Labor Museum, published as an insert in Locust Review. Here are some excerpts from Balmletter #1.
Read MoreInterface
ON SCREEN: a woman appears in head and shoulders shot. She is smiling though inscrutable, beautiful but also very generic.
Woman: [With a floating accent] Hi there and welcome the Good Time Happy Fun Resort where excitement and relaxation go hand in head, for an experience you’ll struggle to remember.
Read MoreBetween the Lines
I had two epiphanies during my artistic development. One was that our current political/social system was unjust and the second was those systems had always been unjust. I, like so many, had been conditioned to be obedient and not rock the boat. Sadly, it took the upheaval of the perceived status quo to open my eyes. Seeing that the mass media had replaced our subconscious, I wanted to subvert that in my work.
Read MoreSound (Chapters 1-3)
BY ONE in the morning, the largest vice house in the Theta District was closed. Most Silver Palms patrons were either long gone or passed out in a dark corner.
I pushed the broom across the black resin floor of Acid Room #2. My workphones played their slow pulsing tone just slightly faster than the ambient pulse back home in the Delta District, what we call Slate Town. Its ambient sound was soothing and slow. Workphones were designed to produce methodical drones. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but part of me was thankful for them. When paired with a time dilating energy drink, work went quickly. It was like turning your brain off.
Read MoreAsstronomical
I read somewhere once that, / people like me / never get to be / everything they wanted
Read MoreLibrary Science + Celebrity Cheeses
MARK MILLER is the author of The Librarian at the End of the World (Montag Press, 2019). Adam Turl interviewed Mark Miller for Locust Review in early 2020.
Read MoreTo Mayakovsky While Australia Burns
Somewhere poetry shot itself.
Read More[Redacted] BALMS
The following redacted verses, based on the Biblical Psalms, were provided by the Born Again Labor Museum and published in Locust #1.
Read MoreOn This Day in History
The following advertisements for a Wisconsin taxidermy shop — each containing unverified historical information — were discovered in the newspaper microform archives at Morris Library in Carbondale, Illinois. Originally published in the Black River Falls Banner Journal Constitution Tribune and Shopper, these were reprinted in Locust Review #1.
Read MoreThe Litany of St. Guillotine
Saint Guillotine! Saint Guillotine!
Death bride of the workers,
Lend us your blade!
Remembering The Winnipeg General
2019 IS THE centenary of the greatest labor action in Canadian history: the Winnipeg General Strike. May 15th, 1919, in solidarity with striking construction workers 2/3rds of Winnipeg’s population went on strike. The city was paralyzed, the ruling class, seeing echoes of the Russian revolution two years earlier, were terrified. State and business interests, represented by the so-called, “Citizen’s Committee of 1000” conspired to break the strike. The Winnipeg Police force walked off the job in solidarity and an army of well-paid goons were quickly assembled. The combined forces of the bourgeois media were used to defame the strike and the strikers’ own newspapers were shut down for “seditious activity”. The strike leaders were eventually arrested under the authoritarian War Measures Act. Shortly thereafter the strike came to its dramatic climax on what was called Bloody Saturday, a riot that left two dead and dozens wounded. On June 26th, in an effort to curb more violence, the strike was called off.
Read More2046: A Vision
For the complete poem by Mike Linaweaver subscribe to Locust Review to get the first full issue (Fall 2019).
Read MoreWhat is Brechtian Cybernetic Design?
BCDT reminds the screen reader they aren’t reading paper. It reminds the print reader they are reading paper. It reminds the print reader they aren’t reading a screen. It reminds the digital reader they are reading on a dream stealing machine. It reminds those holding the physical design of ephemerality.
Read MoreToilet Key Anthology
When the homeless lady asks to wash her face / you should say “I just mopped in there.” / But you’ll hand her the vinyl pipe / with the little silver twist of wire.
Read MoreWhat is BALM?
What seemed like a winged space-alien to Mr. Feature-214, or an angel of God to the Person brothers, appeared to the three men. It did not speak — and disappeared within moments —but the three men all “heard” the same message. They were to go into the world and collect the records of all the lost performances of the enslaved, exploited, and oppressed; including all the hidden dreams and nightmares.
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Soluble Futures: Flint
Once, we made those buildings hum. First we took Fisher Body Numbers 2 and 1. They said auto would never go union. That we were too shifty and unreliable. That’s what they said.
Read MoreDesert Dreams + Commie Cowboys
WHEN JON Langford was at art school – University of Leeds, the college he refers to below – it was right around the time that TJ Clark showed up. Clark, the Marxist art historian and one-time only British member of the Situationist International, apparently did a lot to pull the university’s art college away from its staid and stale academic approach to art. Langford, in other interviews, has jokingly likened him to a Che Guevara figure for the art department.
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