The Hard Crackers Release Party for Issue #9 on Saturday, January 7th, went off with a bang, not of the NYPD variety. Between 20 and 30 people were in attendance. The Freddy’s Bar Backroom was filled. John Garvey gave an introduction and laid out the Hard Crackers journey since our last event at Freddy’s, which was […]
Nightmares of Christmas Past
What do we appreciate about the work of Charles Dickens? Dickens wrote fantastic, unbelievable stories about everyday urban life and social reality in the Victorian England hellscape. He used the lives of women and children (and their labor) to highlight the horrors he was observing in his time. Many have pointed out that the streets […]
Zoomers Go to Hell
This October marked the release of Hellraiser (2022), a putative reboot of the 1987 horror classic and the eleventh entry into the Hellraiser franchise. It is especially significant for the involvement of creator Clive Barker, who has been absent from Hellraiser films for decades, as their intellectual property owner, Dimension Films, cranked out one direct-to-video […]
The Silos of History: Remarks on Romain Gavras’ Athena
To be a revolutionary during the first decade of the 20th century meant recognizing that one stood at the beginning of a new strategic era, one marked by the eclipse and exhaustion of a certain Blanquist solution to the problem of revolutionary conquest. For the Blanquist conspiracists of the 19th century, the subversion of the […]
Socialism or Suburbia
“Privilege is provisional,” writes Margo Jefferson in Negroland, part memoir, part history of African Americans like herself who grew up “middle class” in Chicago. “Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn […] Keep a close watch.” One of the first memories I have from living in the middle-class South Asian-heavy enclaves of […]
Above the Cloudline
We’re sitting on the front veranda of a small house in the mountains, maybe 90 minutes’ drive from the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, whose beauty queen has just been crowned Miss Colombia. I know this because at around 2 one morning we’d been woken by explosions, and I’d thought the war had come to Bucaramanga […]