Element from the title sequence of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux.
What’s this video? A plot abstract may run one thing like this: A low-quality cellphone data, in sluggish movement, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. An extended, clear inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck throughout a garden and into the lake. They get caught; they wrestle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and finally males in aprons (the fish stockers?) decide up the tube and power the final fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to observe the method—youngsters are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish by the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs out and in of the body. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Mind, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Jail Notebooks and letters, during which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White units the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” full with periodically tolling bell.
The video’s enchantment is its fixed oscillation between tragedy and, properly, bathos. At first, the video looks like a humorous TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, foolish suburban fish scenario. Ha. However then it goes on for nearly eight minutes? Simply as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” turns into a stunning and resigned dirge when slowed down (advocate), one thing concerning the dilation of time adjustments the tonality of White’s video. It creates house for an aesthetically smart motion between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time permits for a number of and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You’ll be able to actually really feel this circulation whenever you’re watching it—really feel the best way your personal feeling turns into its obvious reverse, and again.
I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first noticed it final 12 months. It has a complete of 110 views as of February 1, a minimum of ten of that are mine. Generally I discover the best way the tumble of the fish’s our bodies seems like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; typically I discover the bearded man’s camo pants; typically I discover the confused pathos of the person who leans out to the touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I really feel, like him, the phobia of the fish, and unhappiness for them. Just like the fish, I really feel the power of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing a technique; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which additionally has the ironic overlay of claiming how foolish it’s, to really feel that. However I resist: I don’t like being informed what to really feel, and if I do really feel one thing like mourning, possibly I’m a idiot. Perhaps these emotions are out of scale, out of tune with the world because it truly is. Or possibly after I see this case as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a sure type of banality, that’s after I’m out of tune with the world because it truly is. Perhaps this tube results in dying. Or possibly it results in one other barely bigger holding tank that’s simply fantastic.
—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader
Barn bitter, an equestrian time period, describes a domesticated horse who doesn’t wish to go away its house. A barn bitter horse will resist being taken from its steady, usually violently. In the event that they are compelled out, they could bolt again house, throwing their rider off their again, typically trampling them. The time period has been taken because the identify for a mysterious sound-collage artist from Winnipeg, Canada. I got here throughout Barn Bitter’s tape horses fucked over the top with bricks in late 2019, on which sparse harmonies on a detuned piano are dubbed over recordings of manic laughter and guttural glossolalia. It’s slightly below 9 minutes lengthy, extremely disturbing, and completely mesmerizing. It was launched beneath two pseudonyms, one in every of which is C. Lara, the identify of an actual racehorse. The opposite is James Druck, a long-dead fraudster implicated in a scheme to kill present horses as a way to accumulate insurance coverage cash. (James Druck’s daughter, whose childhood horse was among the many horses killed, can also be the inspiration for a central character in Jay McInerney’s novel Story of My Life.)
I really feel like I’m watching scenes from a horror film on a deteriorating VHS tape in a big, chilly, empty home: the grotesque photographs are exhausting to make out; I can’t inform if the fuzziness is making the expertise roughly fascinating or nauseating. Most of Barn Bitter’s releases have titles invoking an esoteric reference to equine terminology. Cleaning soap & Glue, their compendium album, launched by Penultimate Press this 12 months, takes its identify from two merchandise traditionally constituted of ground-up horse components. It’s an acceptable identify for the album, which is filled with reworkings and rebludgeonings of their beforehand launched materials—but additionally as a result of it’s billed as Barn Bitter’s ultimate launch, their dying, their physique of labor floor to a pulp. Be a part of them for a ultimate foal-y à deux earlier than they trot again to their barn for good.
—Troy Schipdam, reader
Whereas visiting my hometown this winter, mildly jet-lagged, I began waking up at 4 A.M. To kill time earlier than the solar rose, I’d watch an animated sci-fi present from the early nineties. Æon Flux—which aired between 1991 and 1995 as a sequence of six experimental movies on MTV’s late-night showcase for indie animators—is completely suited to the borderland between dreaming and consciousness. Within the iconic title sequence, an insect lands on a girl’s cheek and crawls into her open, pupilless eye solely to be captured in its lashes, as in a Venus flytrap, when the lids snap shut. The attention reopens and the pupil swivels into place, bringing its prey into focus. Most of the parts that earned the present its cult following are there within the intro: hallucinatory photographs, biopunk physique augmentation, a little bit of eroticized violence. Set in an ultramodern dystopia, Æon Flux follows the titular character, a femme fatale–sort (slicked-down black hair, violet irises, bondage gear) who works as an murderer for the resistance. We rapidly be taught that Æon is a morally ambiguous antiheroine touring between two competing societies: the anarchic Monica and the technocratic police state Bregna, dominated by an Aryan-blond despot (and Æon’s nemesis-lover) referred to as Trevor Goodchild. Æon is continuously killed and reincarnated earlier than the credit roll.
Æon Flux is a masterpiece of visible storytelling. Its early episodes are freed from dialogue and as a substitute rely closely on clusters of impressions and shifts in perspective. Influenced by Egon Schiele, the French cartoonist Moebius, and manga artists like Kazuo Umezu and Osamu Tezuka, the creator and director Peter Chung’s model is outlined by expressive traces. He prioritizes evocative character design—elongated, sinewy figures, angular structure—over floor element. The sequence is a mix of fetish content material, basic sci-fi, and, in keeping with some fan theories, Gnostic symbolism. In a single episode, the physique of a soldier is reanimated so his stomach can be utilized to gestate a godlike being with an iridescent halo. In one other, a girl’s shattered vertebra is surgically eliminated, permitting her to rotate her physique a full 360 levels, and changed with a tool that reseals her spinal column with the push of a button. Late within the sequence, Æon clones her personal physique in a biotech laboratory, and, in a campy allusion to Narcissus and his reflection, she kisses her surrogate self as she emerges from a pool of water.
Consuming a nonstop stream of photographs like this for just a few hours every morning, beneath my mother and father’ roof as soon as extra, left me feeling delirious and impossibly outdated. However Chung’s characters, with their contortionist acrobatics and cyberpunk experiments, additionally plucked the string inside me that tethers me to my child self, the one who learn books about dystopian futures, kissed ladies of their bed room as soon as their mother and father had gone to sleep, and tried to determine what they needed to do with their physique.
—Jay Graham, reader
