Progressive culture since 1954
The question, then, is how to deterritorialise black metal? How do black metal fans and artists open potential lines of flight that can break out of such limitations? Hval offers an escape through art’s occult potential; its ability to alter reality.
Through scrolling lines on an antique television, The Omega Man watches Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock, clutching the stock of his machine gun, cheering the military parade from a trench haunted by recollections of La Belle Epoch by the hourglass of the yellow river, a shotglass of vodka on the dustcover photo of ‘Nugget’ Coombs.
This week it’s exactly eighty years since my great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, was murdered in a gas chamber built into the cellar of an asylum in Hadamar, a small town close to Frankfurt. She was forty-nine and had four children, of which my grandmother was the eldest.
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Christchurch, killing 185 people. I last wrote about the city’s rebuild for Overland two years ago, and there has been so little progress that that piece barely needs an update. It might be worth it then to drive deeper into the fundamental mistakes that have led the city to the place it is now, and why the inability of our politicians to address these issues is so utterly infuriating.
This is a political project of wilful ignorance that we as citizens are implicitly asked to co-enact, over and over again. There is a hacking apart of the web of violence – of cause and effect, words and actions, ideas and transgressions – to allow for a successful scapegoating of evil men: dangerous psychopaths whose actions are to be viewed as outliers. In this effort, the Coalition Government leads the charge. In their manufactured reality, the worst kinds of violence against women are heinous, but they are also aberrations.
For a second, Rae thinks about leaving them wherever they’ve hidden, finding a secret spot and just waiting out the time until her parents come to collect her. But then she feels the pang of being left out, always the strange quiet one who doesn’t know how to have fun. ‘Ready or not, here I come!’
After a long string of strikes, the final stages of the construction of the Sydney Opera House were carried out without any managers. For a month and a half, the workers experienced first-hand what they had long presumed – that they really didn’t need the bosses. They planned and made decisions democratically, won huge advances in pay and conditions, and together constructed one of Australia’s most enduring and beloved icons. The building embodies all of this, to this day.
It’s time for mainstream feminism to understand the role that privacy plays in the societal and technological systems of power we wish to re-imagine, and for privacy advocates to benefit from the ways a feminist lens can enrich how we think about data and technology.
‘Your shift tomorrow has been cancelled pending further investigation from today’s incident involving yourself sitting on a chair behind the bar.’
In case it still wasn’t clear: Facebook is not a public service. Today, it has shown it by taking an unforgivably heavy hand to banning content – targeting everything from the Bureau of Meteorology to the Australian Council of Trade Unions. In doing so, it continues to show us what the company is really like: it’s time we finally believe them.
My vagina disappoints me, I say to myself once a month or so. One doctor looks at my vagina and says, ‘yes, well, that’s the sort of vagina you got on the public health in 1972.’