Will you invest in what does not exist?

 by  Shaun Lawton 

   Will you invest in the future?  Ask yourself this question, over and over, every day while you go to work, while you punch the clock, while you offer up 36% of your waking life to the company you work for, while multi-billion dollar corporations are already locked in to the emergent and slowly burgeoning AI/Robotics industry, shaping and paving the way forward to a new global economy set for the 21st century.  Remember:  the future will always remain at least one day out of reach, when you look at it from a certain limited perspective. 

    So start looking at it from another perspective, start thinking outside the box of time, and realize you are here now, because you've always been here now, and may easily remain here tomorrow, despite this framework which states there's no such thing as the future.  Perhaps the future isn't the only thing that there's no such thing as.  Perhaps there's no such thing as everything we once believed in. 

    Welcome to the center of this far beyond hurricane force condition known as reality.  A reality we have all been born into, and awaken by degrees from within the supernal eye of this storm of circumstance.  We all share this one irrefutable condition, which remains being alive at the mercy of powerful cosmic elements we can only begin speculating about, yet have no real authentic proof exist, per se. I'm referring to the immense black hole theorized to be at the center of our galaxy, but which we could just as easily already be trapped within the rim of, fated to live out the totality of our natural lifespans supported by a process we would deem monstrous should we ever be granted the privilege of glimpsing even a fraction of it's scale.  What keeps us alive in this world besides the air we breathe, the oxygen we ventilate into our lungs and process into our bloodstream to be carried to our tissues and extremities, eliminating the Carbon dioxide and granting us the autonomy to move about within the life-giving atmosphere of our planet, to commit our daily activities?  

   Many have come to enshrine their answer to this question with "God," and all manner of religious iconographies and explanations, but one thing remains certain in our swiftly evolving world of intermixed dogma and poetry.  And that remains the fact that no explanation is necessary, so long as we embrace the great mystery of our existence with something that can only be described as being at least parallel, if not perfectly analogous to having faith the total equilibrium of our cosmos balances out for each one of us lucky enough to have been born into this staggering and chaotically ordered world. 

   Will you invest in what does not seem to exist?  This has been a private service announcement intended to stimulate thought within your own consciousness. Take from it what you will.  For you have already been invested in the greater scheme of things, whether you're aware of it or not.  Perhaps it's time to shift our gears of thinking outside the box, and into the fast lane of the rapidly evolving technological singularity we wake up to every day and take for granted.  As the divide between the super wealthy and the forsaken and impoverished yawns open and apart like a great, corroded smile with missing and rotted teeth, think hard about what opportunities might be offered in the complicated game of making money in this world.

The one thing which remains clear to me at this time is that our options for making a living have only increased, leaving the potential of 9 to 5s a mere nostalgic selection on this wide open menu perpetually being offered to us every day. Meanwhile, the Sun continues to rise and greet our smiling faces.  Best of luck to us all. We've all been thrown off a cliff since the day we were born. So let's keep on building our wings on the way down.  Some day we'll each catch an updraft, and soar.  

Just Dip Your Toes Here As We Enter The Shape of Water

 reviewed by Shaun Lawton for the Oscillating Oculus 

                                         image courtesy of Fox Searchlight 

    Finally a movie comes along in 2017 made in the old Hollywood style that does justice to the clipped, effective acting and gripping set pieces of the classic age of film, this new version presented as one of those same popular movies from a bygone era which drew crowds in out of the rain to witness the glorious spectacle of Cinerama. From the inventive opening shot of an ordinary tenement's hallway underwater you already know you're in for an interesting ride. (Ok so I'm only spoiling the very beginning, that's it, and only a little bit.) Just a few minutes into it and that feeling of awe began expanding in my chest with a sense of wonder, instilling its icy fingers shivering through me. The movie does not disappoint after the total flow of events and even manages to capture a sense of relevance between secondary and tertiary characters enough to add to the wonderful nuances which ultimately lift the film and help it reflect deeply on the many associations with its spiraled-out-of-control outcome and how it parallels where we currently seem to be headed in real life. When people throw the word 'masterpiece' around it's not to be taken lightly, and I believe that's exactly what this movie is, a masterpiece of fusion between the old and the new. Because it's so good at speaking for itself, I feel I should keep this review as free of spoilers as possible. Or to put it another way, to keep it at a bare minimum (say, for example, within the threshold of assuming most reader's will have seen the trailers) for the courtesy of those who have yet to see the movie. In this review I just want to share my initial impressions from a first viewing with you.

   I think this film reaches the heart of many people due to its particularly thoughtful approach to a variety of subjects. While managing to be a distillation of many tropes across Hollywood history, the introductory narration mentions something about "the monster that came to ruin everything," and you already know its referencing the Michael Shannon character from having seen the trailers, which is when you begin to get the idea The Shape of Water is the perfect inversion of the classic Hollywood monster movie. And what finesse does Mr. del Toro put on it! The movie's a pure joy to watch and listen to. With a remarkably adept soundtrack to help take you back to that era, the early sixties, and to peer into its post-industrial depths with stark clarity and honesty, what more could one ask for? I think The Shape of Water delivers more than one should expect.

   It's no secret that del Toro, sort of like his contemporary Tarantino, has enough of a deep love, admiration and respect for older movies to withdraw what he could from the classics and project them into the present tense to keep that spirit of the silver screen alive, its why we continue to flock to the theater to see films like this and why these directors are driven to fulfill their need to make them for us. Thank you Guillermo, for this celluloid love letter. It's a beautifully executed drama with a lot of heart and character. The tense and funny moments are pulled off effortlessly, and there's a flow to the course of events that may have been intended to reflect that of water's, because the more you think about this movie after seeing it the more rewards it has to reveal. It's just that kind of a film. The character Giles, for instance, is presented courtesy of a splendid performance by Richard Jenkins. It's a real pleasure to finally see Michael Shannon back in a role he can really sink his teeth into again. And bite down he does. He slips into his character of Richard Strickland with such deadly ease, dare I say it's a delight to watch. Considering the interesting set of characters we meet along the way, including a terse and effective performance by Michael Stuhlbarg as Dr. Hoffstetler, as well as several tense scenes which eventually culminate in a small helping of del Toro's signature visceral violence. This is a movie you could easily watch again because it has great heart and character, besides being subtly filled with lucid allusions to keep audiences rapt and thinking. I really enjoyed watching it and got a sense the rest of the audience did, too. It's likely to improve with multiple viewings which is another way of saying survive the test of time. 

   I found The Shape of Water to be no less than poetry expressed on celluloid. I don't think I'm implementing hyperbole when I suggest it's cast by a pretty experienced magician holding us spellbound in the dark. It's not a huge stretch to observe that we already know we're all comprised of at least sixty percent water, and the manner in which the theme of this undercurrent presents itself throughout the film becomes at times astonishing (at least once forcing our suspension of disbelief to its limits in a sequence which turns out to be worthwhile) while managing to be engaging and hypnotic during others.  Guillermo del Toro's tenth motion picture is a tightly coiled narrative which doesn't waste a single frame, and a throwback to a time when auteur filmmakers shone forth their headlamps through the smoke swirling antechambers of darkened theaters all across the world. This is the mature work of an American treasure to cinema. It's age old themes of power and control, class-struggle and faith paving governing and bigotry all work well together woven into the cultural motifs of our own day.  At once topical and nostalgic, it nonetheless avoids coming across pretentious but instead with a realistic immediacy which never wavers into melodrama. The movie's a lot of things, a post coldwar neo-noir thriller disguised as an homage to the classic Universal monster movies of a bygone era, certainly; but it's also a tantalizing tale pushing the boundaries of the traditional beauty and the beast love story into a better developed urban technological setting. 

   Hey, forget about what reviewers have to say. This movie's more than all that. It's the thinking person's Humanoid From The Deep. I suggest you go see this one to find out for yourself how good it is. It's the sort of movie only one of a very few dying breed of filmmakers could make, today. I wouldn't expect anything less from Guillermo del Toro, and this movie remains as proof positive that he's one of the greats when it comes to fantasy filmmaking.

art by Chet Phillips 

The Temporal Satellite Generators

 by shunjinx talonratios

   Under the bright hazards of the moon, our sorrow's benefactor held a ritual of relevance at dawn. The clouds had gathered from all the municipalities surrounding, and stacked themselves as deep as they could. The starry constellations glittered visibly above and beyond them. The secret of life lay configured in the stars, a pattern long lost to any who would behold them.  

   The Violetus Centripetalis Order of the Spectral Shade prime officer Vulpus Lupin II high chancellor of interdimensional liasons stands before all visitation rights and preliminaries.  He's reputed to be an impartial judge of remorseless character. The world order could never be maintained for another heartbeat should any of the toiling majority suspect otherwise.  

    What was coursing through his mind was The Dissolving Memory storms to come would last a thousand years. None with any capacity to speak would be left to survive in the wake of that silent calamity. The recurrence of the revolutionary circumferential dynamic completing any sort of imagined closed circuit remains quintessentially fantastic, yet quite affordable as an imaginary token when considering the impenetrable depth of magnitude the full spectral array of frames between the moments would fill in that space.  

     No such repeating cycle of orbit remains within eternity's compass. Rather, thinnies begin to manifest in a corner of the temple of the purple sun. A continuum of fairy tales emerge from this stratum. Known in certain quadrants as the Temple of Salamanus, captured in scraps of cuneiform salvaged from the long buried history of Phaeton, the former fifth planet from the Sun. We wander ever closer toward our quarry. 

    

The Question

 asked by underground reporter, Shaun Grub 

    A lot of crisscrossing over between genre going on, but its taken past its ultimate levels, now four years post-pandemic we've found floodgates blasted off their hinges and another breakthrough tsunami pours forth.  There's a difference between too much information and data, one's indiscrete in polite company, while the other more often overwhelms. It's not so much that we aren't made to be prepared for it, as it remains that we've been conditioned to accept it on a mass scale, as if its real, because it was on the news, or we read it online.  The face of media has not only undergone an extreme transformation, but the very process itself has subsumed to a new threshold of context, when we consider just what it is our audience wants to really know.  

     Don't ask the questions that journalists once used to not hesitate to bring to their newspaper column, unless they are the questions our people most want to know about. Don't presume to know what the people are thinking about, now.  The very least we could do is to politely ask.  

      The welfare of all remains a universal right regardless how people describe it. We all feel and want the same thing no matter how much anybody denies it. Bravery sides with the light of truth while cowardice hides in the darkness. If it sounds too good to be true you are likely hearing what the actual case may be. Things are never as bad as they're painted and seldom a tenth as horrid as they seem. That's because all of the blessings we counted remain even if they have been forgotten. 

     In order to ask the people in a way that could circumscribe the internet, we put out an interactive newspaper. This would mean that the first issue would be a query issue sent out to the public.  It would be comprised of articles and surveys gathering what the community who reads the paper is wanting and feeling, and what topics, local and otherwise, they most want to be updated about. I don't know exactly how such a process would realistically begin, or if there's been an analogue to this before, which for all we know, could be a reprisal of classic stages of historic journalism, nothing new but instead just something whose time may have come around once again. 

     The underlying theme here must be to not allow any sort of degree of trickery to commence along the lines of who comprises our audience.  Let me cut to the chase here, the real underlying deal remains that people my age (gen X) may realistically remain another three decades without batting an eye, the point being we can not afford to let anyone say "that demographic does not exist anymore" because even some of our parents are still hanging on, for the love of Christ we want to be free to live as long as we want and get old here together in our country of sweet liberty, don't we?  

     It's not too much to ask, of course, it goes without saying, because we take it for granted eternally, and why shouldn't we? This is the United States of America, I think the entire country's run by an incredibly elaborate network of too many people for our minds to fully process into a picture we can see in any context. Regardless, most of us are going to have our opinions. That's why we continue doing our thing, going to work respectively with a good portion of us hooked on being online, whether addicted to social utility networks since Myspace or doom-scrolling along on X or Instagram, the social dilemma's expanding repercussions are ongoing and potentially being exacerbated in unnecessary and complicated ways that it may just be far too late to stop because we're all entangled in it together so certain financial disasters or gains could be chalked off some day all too soon to being just like back in the old days when we could suddenly be having bad weather.  

      Welcome to the new subPrime dominion multiverse entangled with the new course we're taking. Each fresh development establishing the whole order of events for the day. Together we're shaping this world into its current form while the old skin gets sloughed off between us. "The map's not the territory," we chant while sleepwalking together in a somnambulist's parade, "because the territory's alive!"  A map's just dead skin like a tossed away photograph, a dead memory fading in time.  While the world never sleeps as it continues to creep in on your nightmares and dreams for a spell.  We move through the landscape anticipating anything because we know it's a greater creature. 

    The question remains, what's it to us? What do we care and why are we here? It's a personal question each one must answer with honesty driven by the presence or lack of being conditioned by fear.  A growing percentage of our own population has been polarized to be drawn into this frightful trap. Most may not even know it or actively oppose it based on uninformed bravado. However, despite it all the truth remains before the light; bright, white and unblemished. It turns out more people on both sides could be decent after all, who on Earth would've ever guessed? Perhaps that's the question that we should all be asking and whose singular answer we all benefit from should be most urgently addressed.  

  

But Quick, the Water Slows!

by  shaun lawton

   I'm reading Jeff VanderMeer's fourth volume in his Southern Reach series, Absolution, which was released just twelve days ago, and I've sunk into its immersive floodwaters sixty-six percent of the way toward complete dissolution (which means I'm on page 287, quite immersed, thank you very much).  I've chosen to embark on this hypnotic narrative journey without feeling the need to prepare myself, as others may have for example, by re-reading AREA X, feeling that my murky, dissolving recollection of its principal characters shouldn't really get in the way of my encountering the cast in this narrative prequel, necessarily. Do I even care to recall details about Old Jim well enough to become vested in what happens to him in this introductory book?  Of course not. It's a moot point when one considers that all four volumes in the series serve as the perpetual blades of a watermill, each helping to push the other forward, in time. Another way of saying the four books operate as a sort of literary Mobius strip, perhaps, for those among us willing to continue the journey by re-reading them. 

   We are looking at a series of four books published over the course of the past decade, beginning in 2014 with the AREA X trilogy, and now 2024 with ABSOLUTION.  One could just as easily report that there are six books, Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, Dead Town, The False Daughter, and The First and the Last, which somewhat incidentally appear analogous to the six books forming The Lord of the Rings trilogy (but I digress, so my apologies). 

    For purposes set to please no one but myself, I now look forward more than ever to continuing the relentless narrative of events being described in Absolution by plunging directly into Annihilation and the subsequent two remaining books just to tidy up the totality of events the author has described for posterity. It's hard to get across the feelings that are being stirred up within me while reading Absolution, but suffice it to say, there's an uncanny spell being cast upon the reader by our marvelous benefactor of words, Jeff VanderMeer. That he's managed to incur dreadful associations tying together situations ordinarily thought of as being disparate, such as listening to your favorite rock music while singing along to the lyrics, and the unsettling implications of half sunken harmonic chord sequences being played out on a gradually going out-of-tune piano left outdoors somewhere along the neverending stretch of the Everglades, being used to occasionally serenade a slowly sinking rusty sunset, well the parallels (if they aren't becoming obvious to you by now) associated with our daily, ritualized reality beginning to fray at the edges and then coming unraveled to the point of being absolutely undone are enough to make this reader anxious, at the very least, and leave me squirming in my seat while the author masterfully tightens the screws at the end of each seemingly innocuous chapter. 

     Ain't no way I'm going to even try to tell you what it's about, damn.  Just pick up the book and read it. Do it soon, before the forces which brought it about pick you out of the crowd and digest you first. You wouldn't like that very much.  To end up in a barrel, never to be found along the vast, squandered territory of the Forgotten Coast.  Me, I think it's better to begin to have an inkling of an idea of what may be coming for us, from beyond.  I don't know though. How it could possibly be "comforting" to be told there shall be a fire that knows your name, lies just beyond my grasp.  But there it is. If what Stephen King said about fiction containing "the truth within the lie" rings at all true to any degree of consideration, then Jeff VanderMeer has concocted horror novels on another level, with this series of four books. They lead you by the hand into an inescapable labyrinth of raw and unflinching terror in which the readers themselves remain complicit. 

    Whether you gravitate towards this series of remarkably speculative fiction because it serves as some sort of twisted "comfort food" (even as it reminds us of our mortality) or for any of its beguiling literary charms, such as presenting a compelling cast set along the borders of the Everglades and the forgotten coastline they encroach upon, or for the series of unnatural events unfolding in relentless and impossible to foresee tides of consequence, I think the rich soil of VanderMeer's writing provides enough flesh and blood and mineral and vegetable nuggets to sustain the reader's wildest imagination, and in a sort of very rarely seen literary magic trick, renders a narrative whose many newly unearthed questions allow the reader to collaborate in the creation of the story, in a manner of speaking. The novel is comprised of a series of nutrient-rich chapters calculated to conduct a sort of hyper- or electromagnetic symphonic continuum serving to exert a sort of hypnotic control over the reader's mind. 

    This isn't to say here in my initial cursory overview of Absolution that readers should stay away from this book, on the contrary. I'm urging you all to seek it out and read it immediately, if you want to know what all the fuss is about.  This is one of the strangest books I've ever read, and I can't exactly explain to you why that is, just yet. Except to say, try reading it for yourselves, and then let the rest of us know what you think about it.  Yet be warned.  The smooth writing contains a host of literary tricks which conjure up a story you may as well be in, and which as a matter of fact, you actually are embedded within at this current moment in time, whether you like it or not.  

   Oh, nevermind.  You go ahead and stay away from these books, the whole cursed lot of them! You are probably much better off held within the safe zone of the comforting illusion which ignorant bliss so reliably offers us.  Stay as far away from AREA X as you can, with its shifting, amorphous borders, its shady characters struggling to survive amid its uncanny presence, a palpable suggestion of biological and evolutionary potential still lingering in the mind of its legion of readers, now lost to having to ponder the various associations made with our real lives, suspended out here in space, on a still mysterious planet thriving with unbridled and yet to be encountered species of maddening life. 

   In a very real literary sense, that's exactly what Jeff VanderMeer appears to have unearthed, here; at least, for me.  A new form of exotic literature, cultivated from the darkness interspersed among the ancient mycelial networks supporting the eternal ravenous nature of our own existence. If I'm reading too much into its subtext, that can only be to its own distinct and eternal credit.  Reading the somewhat massive text of the Southern Reach series may not be for everyone, granted. It has certainly carried me along for a most gratifying ride, and gradually subsumed me into its complicated netherworld of evolutionary context that continues to fire synapses in my brain, in the hopes of making new connections in piecing together not merely all that it covers directly within its supernatural pages haunted by the writing of the dead, but also in shedding some light over the mysterious things it carries with its host of implications.  It delivers on all fronts what the best fantastical writings have traditionally delivered, which is leaving the reader with that sense of wonder only the strangest and deepest of fairy tales may conjure.   An actual mirror to reality.