The Applicant

He is such a stoic piece of marble that pigeons shit on him as he smiles. Your Boss wants to be your friend. His head is like a Thursday. His voice could best be described as 78 degrees with a slight chance of showers.

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German Nightmares

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.

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Your 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.

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Irrealist 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.

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Interface

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.

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Between 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.

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Sound (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.

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On 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.

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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. 

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