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Prose Poetry Manifesto: From Hakim Bey’s T. A. Z.

“I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.”

— from The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
by Hakim Bey

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Shanghai’s 1933 Slaughterhouse

This beautiful concrete, glass, and steel edifice, designed by British architects and built by Chinese developers in 1933, is an Art Deco wonder of space, natural light, and enigmatic curves and bends. It’s hard to imagine that this incredible building, which reminds me of a Lovecraftian elder city of stone labyrinths, was originally designed as a slaughterhouse.

Its maze-like passages were built to herd cattle along to their deaths. The rough surfaces were to prevent cattle from slipping, even on floors slick with blood. Atlas Obscura says, “The hulking spiderweb of intertwining staircases, ramps, bridges and corridors was all part of guiding the flow of both thousands of workers to their stations, and millions of cattle to their deaths….Ultimately it is the interlocking staircases and twenty-six ‘air bridges’ of varying width that connect the outer areas with the circular core that give the building its mind-bending M. C. Escher quality.”

It underwent a major renovation in 1998 after being abandoned for years, and is now used as a sort of mall and simply called “1933.” This architectural gem reminds me of Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, a gorgeous midcentury industrial district of military factory buildings built in the ’50s in a Bauhaus-inspired style, which was reclaimed and redesigned by artists in the ’90s and 2000s, and is now a home to art studios, galleries, and cafes, with a unique, spacious, majestic, beautiful, half-sterile feel. 1933 would be amazing as a center for art and creativity.

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Formulaic Halo: The Art of John Brophy

The beautifully rendered paintings of Seattle-based artist John Brophy, evoking images of the Holy Virgin, combine the divine and the empirical, innocence and malice. Religious iconography is a predominant theme, and it goes hand in hand with math, science, nature, disaster, violence, and mythology. The mystical is juxtaposed with mathematical formulae, Christian virtue is bedecked with symbols of 20th-century evil such as Nazi swastikas and atom bombs. This surreal imagery has an immediate photographic realism that is achieved through Brophy’s technique of first making a 3D study of the work using Maya, ZBrush, and Photoshop, and then executing it in oil paints à la 15th-century Flemish masters. The polished, perfect tangibility of these images makes them all the more poignant.

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Alice Auaa A/W 2013

Featuring gorgeous, dark, structural coats and romantic dresses, Alice Auaa’s entrancing autumn/winter 2013-14 ready-to-wear collection abounds in ruffles and cobweb-like threads, as well as apocalyptic distressing, and is strikingly mysterious and sinister in its feel.

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