Category Archives: Nihilism

Credits

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.

The most advanced AIsupercomputersare considered so awesome because of the speed with which they can process information, so far up to one quintillion calculations per second!For all the feverish hubbub stirred by humankinds newest innovation, one wonders, though, if awe itself, encountered in poetic time, will be lost in this age of acceleration.

Poetic time is the opposite of the turbocharged tempo of intelligent machines. It apprehends reality by dwelling mindfully on those moments computation relegates in passing to mere data points.

It is worth slowing down along our quickening trajectory to reflect on the sage perspectives of two of the greatestpoetsof the 20thcentury, Octavio Paz and Czesaw Miosz, both muses of the moment whom I had the humbling privilege of knowing.

For Miosz, good poetry expresses a sense of piety for being in a world that has succumbed to a peculiar nihilism in which experience loses is colors. Grayness covers not only things of this earth and space, but also the very flow of time, the minutes, days and years.

In such a dulled-down landscape, abstract considerations are of little help or remedy, the Nobel laureate put it to me in one conversation. Poetry matters greatly in the face of this deprivation because it looks at the singular, not the general. It cannot look at things of this earth other than honestly, with reverence, as colorful and variegated; it cannot reduce life with all its pain and ecstasy into a unified tonality. By necessity it is on the side of being.

For Miosz, mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops. And what is time? Time is our regrets, our shame. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape. In that moment of time stopped, reality is liberated from suffering. Then, in art, you can have a purified vision of things independently of our dirt. Everything that concerns us disappears, is dissolved, and it does not matter whether the eye that looks is that of a beggar or a king.

The eternal moment in the gaze of the Polish poet is like a gleam on the current of a black river, retrieved from movement by mindful attention.

One of Miloszspoemsperfectly illustrates this pious regard for those palpable moments of being that elude any abstract sense at the end of the road of existence. It reads in part:

I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.

But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away.

Octavio Paz, also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, put the nature of the moment in the larger frame of social evolution. He believed that temporal succession no longer rules the imagination after all of the abstract utopias of modern progress that didnt pan out. As now recognized by quantum science, he saw that we live instead in the conjunction of times and spaces, of synchronicity and confluence, which converge in the pure time of the instant. Coherence and equilibrium are the momentary exception in the random swirl of disequilibrium that is the rule.

As the poet explained further in a conversation in Mexico City back in the 1980s, This time without measure is not optimistic. It doesnt propose paradise now. It recognizes death, which the modern cult of the future denies, but also embraces the intensity of life. In the moment, the dark and the luminous side of human nature are reconciled. The paradox of the instant is that it is simultaneously all time and no time. It is here and it is gone. It is the point of equilibrium between being and becoming.

He continued: The instant is a window to the other side of time eternity. The other world can be glimpsed in the flash of its existence. In this sense, poets have always had something to show modern man.

While this recognition of time without measure may be new to the modern sensibility of the Western clock, Paz pointed out, it has long been intimated in the East through the traditional form of the haiku. This terse but evocative verse from the Edo-era Japanese poetMatsuo Bash is a classic example:

Stillness Penetrating the rocks The sounds of cicada

In his last poem, Response and Reconciliation, Paz conveyed his vision of time arrested using a similar metaphor as Milosz to describe the eternal moment of being in the flow of becoming:

For a moment, sometimes, we see not with our eyes, but with our thoughts time resting in a pause. The world half-opens and we glimpse the immaculate kingdom the pure forms, presences unmoving, floating on the hour, a river stopped.

If, as Paz said, poetic time had much to teach modernity, it has even more to teach the hastening era of hyper-modernity we are now entering.

Read more from the original source:

Poetic Time In The Age Of Acceleration - Noema Magazine

When singer-songwriter Chloe Drallos first premiered her music project known as Zilched in 2018, she self-ascribed her own genre of doom pop.

While arguably cryptic, it also somehow perfectly fits.

The music of Zilched is a murky mix of brooding guitars and catchy, haunting choruses, while moody minor keys and drapes of distortion envelop lyrics of disenchantment sung in a low, beautifully dusky voice that could soar into higher ranges and still retain its bittersweetness.

The bitter and the sweet, the doom and the pop, the low and the high. You hear the name Zilched and it suggests depletion or perhaps millennial nihilism but what Drallos is after is much more expansive.

Tangentially, the overall sound and production for her dulcet gloom ballads are expanded and refined on her latest album,Earthly Delights, due to her collaboration with producers Ben Collins and Ian Ruhala. Drallos is tapping into styles that are typically associated with angst goth, noise-pop or post-grunge and the angst portrayed on Earthly Delights is the strain of existing within a volatile vortex between those dichotomies.

Watch the music video for Zilched The Flood

There are sentiments strung across the record that admit to a yearning but still acknowledge a certain hopelessness. Drallos is singing from a balancing point between desolation and delight, if not some kind of divine. And maybe thats a way to interpret the zilch of Zilched the zero balance between the muck and the marvelous of living and loving and losing and learning.

Its the plight of the yearning / To build up a wall and then watch it decay / Its all tragedy / But its what you love, Drallos sings on (You Love) The Tragedy.

Oh, the angst. No one does it better than Zilched. Earthly Delights is Drallos best album to date.

Its worth noting that the albums title is a reference to a famous painting by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, which was painted as a triptych the Garden of Earthly Delights is essentially in dimensional balance between heaven and hell.

And while there are some provocative religious references scattered across the record, its all about the balance of that triptych that makes it feel like the perfect allusion for a Zilched album title.

Zilched will celebrate the release of Earthly Delights this Saturday at El Club in Detroit. Tickets are $17 and available at elclubdetroit.com.

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Review: Zilched releases her best work yet in 'Earthly Delights' - WDET

This week on the Q with Tom Power podcast is host Tom's post-Coachella sit down with singer Phoebe Bridgers for a career-spanning interview tracing her early years in Pasadena, CA, to becoming one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of her time.

LISTEN NOW:Q with Tom Power:Phoebe Bridgers

4X-GRAMMY nominee Phoebe Bridgers is known for her sad-girl Alt-anthems both as a solo artist and with her group boygenius, offering extremely specific and relatable songs to a growing fan base as rabid as Beyonc's Bey Hive and Taylor's Swifties.

Phoebe explains her upbringing in the suburbs of Pasadena, where she somehow tapped into a kind of "past-life pain" when she began writing deeply personal songs at the age of ten. "I think I was just trying to make myself happy," she says. "I also remember I thought plagiarism wasn't as big a deal when I was little. I would literally steal verses from other people and put them into my own songs."

Now 29 years old, the "past-life pain" has given way to real-life relationships, experiences, and loss -- all of which she's considered fair game in her songwriting. Though she's known for leaning into the sad side with her songs, Phoebe says that may not always be where her initial inspiration began. "I have disassociative tendencies, so I think I write it and I'm like, 'that was pretty.' Then like a year later I'm like, 'Oh s***, this is actually really heavy.'"

"Believe it or not," she explains, "when I feel down, I'm actually trying to get better... the thing that's been commodified," Phoebe believes in the outward appearance people give off about never being able to find happiness. "Well, I hope that's not true," she adds.

"When people write about it too much, it's like everybody knows everything about you. But I think there's something to be said for -- and I talk about this with my friends all the time -- people just think you're smarter if you're sad," Phoebe says. "Peppy love songs get kind of a bad rap as being dumb, and I think my next challenge in my life is to have a way to write about happiness that doesnt make me cringe.

"It's self-protective... Culturally, just think about every nihilist ever -- I guess it's not nihilism to be emo -- but I think you associate darkness with being an intellectual or something. I think that's such a narrow lens, and Im guilty of it too.

Listen to the full episodewithPhoebe Bridgers above. Also in this episode, Shane Ghostkeeper talks to guest host Talia Schlanger about his deeply personal song Hunger Strike and more.

Five days a week, acclaimed interviewerTom Powersits down with the artists, writers, actors, and musicians who define pop culture. Whether hes ribbingAdele, singing a boyband classic withSimu Liu, or dissecting faith withU2frontmanBono Tom brings the same curiosity, respect, and meticulous preparation into every conversation. He also has a track record for interviewing artists on the precipice of stardom likeLizzoandBillie Eilish who appeared onQwell before hitting the mainstream. Hear your favorite artists as they truly are, every weekday with Tom Power.

Listen to more of your favorite music on Audacy's Women of Alt, Emo Kids, Alt Now, Rockternative, Drivin' Alt, New Wave Mix Tape, 90s and Chill, Alterna 00s, IndustriALT,Greatest Guitarists, Greatest Drummers, and ALT Roots stations -- plus check out our talent-hosted Kevan Kenney's Music Discovery, and Megan Holiday's My So Called '90s Playlist.

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Phoebe Bridgers thinks we confuse sadness with intelligence: Listen ... - Audacy

Detail from "Portrait of Nietzsche" (1906) by Edvard Munch (Image: Wikipedia)

When I was a young man, I loved Peter Weirs 1989 boarding school drama Dead Poets Society, featuring Robin Williams in one of his most celebrated roles.

Back then, I admired Williamss character, Mr. Keating, a rebel rouser teacher who tries to wake up a group of rich kids, who, without his help, are destined to end up in the same boardrooms and country clubs as their fathers. I liked the rebellious stuff, but I also admired the stuffy establishment setting. That was me, I guess: a kid who felt at home in a conservative aesthetic but did not want to be told what to do. My one complaint with the film was that the boys did not appreciate that they got to push their boundaries amid New England fall foliage and mahogany leather, while I was suffering alongside philistines in flip-flops at my suburban Florida mega-high school.

Anyway, Mr. Keating did not follow the script, prescribing Walt Whitman poems and encouraging the bookish young men in his charge to sound their barbaric yawps. He turned a blind eye when they snuck off at night to perform faux-primitive rituals and read their middling adolescent verses aloud. Again, as a teenager I ate it up. When Mr. Keating got fired after one of the boys committed suicide, I felt bad for him. I imagined I would have stood up on my desk proclaiming O Captain, my Captain along with the other boys who were devastated to see their rascally mentor go.

Through high school and college, I pretended to intellectual superiority by avoiding mainstream American male inanities. I never set foot in a frat house. I majored in French. I sat alone on my dorm balcony smoking cigarettes and listening to Nick Drake. I looked to cinematic icons like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Woody Allen (yes, Woody Allen), and I searched half-heartedly for my own brand of existentialism. I decided to keep God sort of in the picture. Good for me.

Then, in the early 2000s, I had a brief career as a high school teacher, and I styled myself something of a Mr. Keating, spouting off whatever niche political opinions I had from one day to the next, belittling the official curriculum I was given to teach, and looking for any opportunity I could to plant seeds in the minds of young people especially boys to reject the rottenness of bourgeois America and to choose an extraordinary path for themselves in life. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who could help guys feel intellectually strong, to avoid being the figure Mr. Keating ridicules in Dead Poets Society: a 98-pound weakling who gets copies of Byron kicked in his face when he goes to the beach.

I also began lifting weights, and despite my skinny frame, I put on muscle quickly, with my personal best lifts increasing for years. I suddenly excelled in physical pursuits with the same rebellious perfectionism that had made me an excellent, even intimidating student in school. I often saw my students at the gym and we would spot each other. In my classroom, I challenged football players to push-up contests, and I never lost. My lifelong prejudice against mediocrity intensified for myself, of course, but increasingly as contempt for weakness in the world too, even though I still proudly voted Blue and was more-or-less comfortable with liberal Protestantism as the best place for a huge snob to opine about what Christianity, and everything else, should be.

It was all pretty fun; but remembering those years makes me cringe a bit now. Like Mr. Keating, I was reckless, and selfish. I was something of a Nietzschean blond beast.

But then God began to save me from myself first by giving me a wife, and then by sending me out to study theology. Suddenly I had one person on earth whose feelings had to come before mine, and whose love for me humbled me, despite my ongoing immaturity. And then I acquired a whole library of Father-figure teachers, intellectual giants that far outweighed my heroes Montaigne and Goethe and Truffaut. I kept lifting weights, certainly. But I looked into the mirror less often and I felt less inclined to enjoy hating the growing cultural void in society around me.

Ive recently discovered these words from Pascals Penses that pulled me back in time to the moment of my spiritual coming-of-age:

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

At twenty-seven years old, I was finally ready to be a man, and a man in Christ. Not a superman.

And this brings us to the aforementioned Friedrich Nietzsche. The sincerity of my Christian upbringing had stuck to me too closely to go all the way dark during my Wanderungsjahren. Even though I was enamored with existentialism, I preferred the humane Camus to the misanthropic Sartre. Hence I mostly avoided Nietzsche; but I can imagine an alternate reality where the right Nietzschean got hold of me at the right moment, and I came out (at least for a while) an utterly cynical, narcissistic creep. And this brings us to a most disturbing latter-day Mr. Keating called the Bronze Age Pervert, a highly-influential Romanian-American man named Costin Alamariu, who was recently profiled in a fascinating piece by Graeme Wood.

I wont rehearse all the details of BAP here again, I highly recommend Woods article for that but heres the gist: A self-described aspiring nudist bodybuilder with a Ph.D. from Yale has captivated a portion of young people on the political Right with the false gospel of Nietzsches beyond good and evil and will-to-power. Learning of the BAP phenomenon immediately reminded me of an idea attributed to Ross Douthat, related here by Rod Dreher: the post-religious Right is really bad news.

But criticizing BAPs immoralism is too easy, and perhaps too self-congratulatory. (Right Wingers love to police our fringes to find real bad guys to point to when progressives smear us.) A more serious intellectual engagement is required.

Now, it is possible that some BAPist aims could overlap with those of faithful Catholics. But the fundamental moral visions are polar opposite. And Woods article asserts that there is a sleeper cell of BAPists who have infiltrated the U.S. government and other influential institutions, and they are biding their time before coming out in the open and seizing the reins. In my mind, there is no chance these guys will ever pull off a coup, but I do have some concerns that the movement will enlarge the space of anti-Christ in our society at the very moment when the veil over the fiction of a neutral public square increasingly falls. And I worry that the Church of our day is in no position to offer astute young seekers, exhausted by mediocrity, a superior lifestyle choice rooted in the philosophical depth BAP presumes to offer.

On this point, Woods otherwise excellent article offers a nave conclusion namely, that BAPs movement may serve to renew the defenses of a liberalism that has grown lazy by taking its dominance for granted for too long. The antibodies are stirring, he writes.

I dont think so.

In fact, I find it hard to believe that great numbers of people under 30 (or 60?) would care to come to the defense of the Enlightenment or find the ideals of liberalism compelling anymore. Nietzsche thought all of this was passing away, and he may have been right. Now the Dictatorship of Relativism has been conquered by the even crueler consumerist, post-human technocracy. To resist it requireswellquite a triumph of the will.

But if Christians must reject BAPs chauvinism and we must and if there is no way to re-implement the ideals of modern liberalism and I dont see how there is we have to propose a different philosophical project of Christian humanism and the resurrection of Christian society.

One person to look to for inspiration is the 20th-century German soldier and polymath Ernst Jnger, a one-time Nietzschean. Ive written before about the early Jnger and his most famous work, Storm of Steel, a World War I memoir with the opposite perspective of Erich Maria Remarques famous All Quiet on the Western Front. Jnger was wounded several times and decorated for valor in the Great War, and afterward he was highly critical of the Weimar government, and of liberal democracy. Hitler admired him, but Jnger never joined the Nazis. He did, however, don the uniform of the Third Reich during World War II, where he was posted to Paris and hobnobbed with French intellectuals. Ultimately, he was peripherally involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler an event fictionalized in Bryan Singers great 2008 film Valkyrie. Hitler knew of Jngers involvement and let him off the hook. Make of that whatever you like.

Jnger is not well known in the United States. His status as a major man of letters in Europe, and particularly Germany, is too enormous to relate here, but this Swedish documentary is a fascinating introduction. Jnger lived to the ripe-old-age of 102, and was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died in 1998. He has become a cult figure for English-speaking Right Wingers, including BAP; but most of them fail to acknowledge Jngers turn away from Nietzscheanism and towards Christian humanism during World War II, when he read through the entire Bible closely. The result was a little treatise called The Peace.

Although Jnger did not refer to himself as a Christian at the time when the book was released, The Peace is entirely grounded in Christian metaphysics. Jnger advocated for dispassionate justice to be meted out to the aggressors, and he wanted a solution that would bring about immediate victory and long-term flourishing for the entire European continent (totally unlike the Treaty of Versailles); but without Christ at the center of society, they may just as well have annihilated each other.

Jnger envisioned a new Christian imperium to stand between the emerging materialist superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. His project was an utter rejection of nihilism, and he wrote Spiritual salvation must come first, and only that peace can bring a blessing which has been preceded by the taming of the passions in these hearts and minds of men. Likewise, If the struggle against nihilism is to succeed, it must be fought out in the heart of each one of us.

And most significantly, Jnger argues that the incautiousness of the Mr. Keatings and the cruelty of the BAPs of the world can only lead us to destruction:

The leadership of men cannot be granted to the nihilists, to the pure technicians or to those who despise all moral obligations. Whoever places his trust in man and human wisdom alone cannot speak as judge, nor can he expound as teacher, heal as doctor or serve the state as official. These are modes of life that end with hangmen in the seats of the mighty.

Jnger rejected the idea that a return to a liberal state was the answer. The failure of Weimarism was final. And while he insisted that the churches were central to the peaceful future of Europe, he also saw that the churches, too, stand in need of a revival.

Eighty years after World War II, Christians must stare down todays nihilism, both in the wacky but worrisome BAP variety, and in the de facto atheism in the hearts of most modern people, including churchgoers. But the Church can only succeed in this task by refocusing on the deep mysteries of reality the God beyond the death of God, as Paul Tillich said. Another much greater German than Jnger, our late Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, pursued this project to the very end of his life.

The Church needs to carry forward Benedicts ideas and teach the world that our faith is a comprehensive, lived philosophical proposal that puts the Bronze Age Perverts antiquated will-to-power Nietzscheanism to shame. And so, we give the late Pope Emeritus the final word here from his essay Monotheism and Tolerance, from Ignatius Press newly published collection What is Christianity? The Last Writings:

The thought of Socrates, who was pious and critical at the same time, had in its own way the effect of unveiling the illusory character of the gods. Today we face the opposite movement of the human mind. Modern thought wants to acknowledge the truth of being, but wants to acquire power over being. It wants to reshape the world according to its own needs and desires. With this orientation not to the truth but to power we no doubt touch on the true problem of the present time.

Todays Christian thinkers task is to expose the lie of powers promises with counter-cultural zeal a task, by the way, that requires manliness (virtus). Is anyone up to the challenge?

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Called to be a man in Christ, not a Nietzschean superman - Catholic World Report

Summary

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a box office disaster. In its opening weekend of release, the film, which is based on the seventh chapter of Bram Stokers classic 1897 novel Dracula, titled Captains Log, grossed a dismal $6.5 million at the domestic box office and will be lucky to reach the $20 million mark throughout its domestic run.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter marks the second failed attempt by the films distributor, Universal Pictures, to mine Stokers novel and revive the Dracula character as part of Universals now seemingly doomed classic monster-verse experiment, following the commercial failure of 2023s campy comedy horror film Renfield, which features Dracula, played by Nicolas Cage, and the Renfield character from the Dracula universe.

While The Last Voyage of the Demeter had a modest production cost of $45 million, the film is nonetheless on pace to be one of the biggest flops of the summer of 2023, as while blockbuster films like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One have certainly become commercial disappointments, in relation to their massive production costs, those films nonetheless grossed hundreds of millions of dollars at the worldwide box office, whereas The Last Voyage of the Demeter is seemingly being avoided by audiences like it was a plague.

While The Last Voyage of the Demeter attempts to deflect the bleakness of the films story with the addition of new characters and an ending that contains at least a semblance of hope, however symbolic, the depressing and tragic source material nonetheless infuses the film with a feeling of inevitability, even for those people who watch the movie without having first read Bram Stokers novel Dracula.

Moreover, for those people who view The Last Voyage of the Demeter with a deep appreciation of both Stokers novel and the titular ships significance within the book, the inevitability of the story's tragic outcome makes the film, despite its genuine qualities, seem both depressing and pointless, as while the similarly bleak Alien prequel films Alien: Covenant and Prometheus distinguished themselves within the Alien film series by answering long-held questions and posing fascinating new questions, The Last Voyage of the Demeter doesnt take viewers in any meaningful creative directions that dont already exist in Stokers novel.

Related: The Last Voyage of the Demeter: How Previous Dracula Films Portray the Horrific Tragedy

Indeed, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is much more similar, both in terms of its creative direction and the disastrous commercial results, to 2011s The Thing, the direct prequel to John Carpenters 1982 film of the same name, as the 2011 prequel, much like what The Last Voyage of the Demeter does to Stokers novel, attempts to blunt the impenetrable nihilism of Carpenters film by introducing new characters, including a potential survivor, whose fate is left unknown at the end of the film.

By following this cynical approach, The Last Voyage of Demeter alienates fans of Stoker's novel while holding no deeper meaning for the uninitiated, as The Last Voyage of the Demeter ultimately reveals itself to be a film with no compelling reason to exist.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter was the only major studio film to be released on August 11, 2023, and the film was heavily promoted by Universal, which attempted to market the film as being like Alien on a ship.

However, despite the fact that audiences have shown a willingness to support a wide variety of films throughout the summer of 2023, from the boundless beauty and optimism of Barbie to the thought-provoking drama of Oppenheimer, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, with its relentlessly gloomy palette and tone, fell into a commercial chasm, as the film, which takes place in 1897, appears to be simultaneously too elevated to energize the core horror audience, specifically in the key eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic, and too gory to interest a more sophisticated audience.

Related: The Best Films about Dracula, Ranked

In this respect, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is similar to Guillermo del Toros 2015 gothic romance film Crimson Peak, which, despite receiving excellent reviews, compared to the middling reviews for The Last Voyage of the Demeter, was too classical and highbrow in its approach to appeal to a large mainstream audience, as reflected in the films disappointing box office performance.

Of course, one key difference between Crimson Peak and The Last Voyage of the Demeter is that while Crimson Peak was a star-driven film with Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston, The Last Voyage of the Demeter features a virtually unknown cast, as the films main attraction is, of course, supposed to be Dracula, whose popular appeal as a horror villain has clearly declined with todays audiences, which seem to now regard Dracula as a genre relic.

The box office failure of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, so soon after the release of Renfield, indeed the seemingly absolute rejection of the Dracula character in the marketplace, would seem to mark the end of Universals long-gestating attempt to create a new cinematic universe based on the classic Universal Monsters film series.

Of course, this cinematic universe, formerly known as the Dark Universe, was intended to begin with 2017s The Mummy, and just as that films colossal failure led to the cancelation of the Dark Universe, its hard to conceive of a narrative in which this would-be universe, under any name, is restarted in the foreseeable future, certainly with Dracula.

Indeed, after The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and 2014s Dracula Untold, its hard to conceive of a scenario in which Dracula is ever featured in another Universal film.

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Why The Last Voyage of the Demeter Sank at the Box Office - MovieWeb

Grand Theft Auto 6, GTA 5, and a Red Dead Redemption remaster are more than enough for Rockstar to focus on right now. But as we approach the 20th anniversary of the first game, and as I come to the end of replaying it, yet again, Im craving the return of Manhunt. One of the greatest horror games ever made, its not just scary, but shocking, smart, and legitimately squalid. Theres something to be said for the current tide of triple-A games, which compared to perhaps two or three decades ago represent a culture that has seriously broadened its appeal. But Manhunt takes me back to a time when gaming was a counter-culture, and it felt like a willingness to experiment and plumb the depths of poor taste still existed among big-name developers.

Im a bit cynical, a bit jaded, and a bit older now than I was, and it takes a lot to really get to me. But I still think Manhunt is genuinely nasty. Ignoring some of the old hysteria and hyperbole, and the reputation that Manhunt has gained as one of the most controversial games ever, this is still more brutal and nihilistic than any other mainstream release Ive seen in my lifetime.

Its a horrible cliche, and often untrue, but I think it genuinely applies with Manhunt you couldnt make this game now, or at least, it seems very unlikely that Rockstar, or any other big developer, would allocate a budget and attempt to market a game like this now.

Its not just the violence. Its the sexualization of the violence. Its the director, Lionel Starkweather,groaning into your earpiece when you open a hunters face with a hammer. Its the old mock-up website for the in-game snuff ring business Valiant Video, a place where you can buy latex gloves and gimp masks.

This is a journey to the center of depravity, a horrible adventure through some of the darkest psychosexual impulses. Your enemies are white supremacists. Your weapons are hand axes, shards of glass, and plastic bags. Stripped to their underwear and tied to a stake, you rescue your family one level, only to watch them butchered, on a VHS tape you find in an abandoned shopping mall, one level later. Its real dirt.

Its the levels with the family that really bring the power of Manhunt home, in fact. In other games, rescuing them would represent something redemptive, an optimistic kind of uptick in the story where were allowed to feel that perhaps the world isnt all bad.

Similarly, when they die, itd be a dramatic turning point, the momentour protagonist, James Earl Cash, resolves to do something topursuesomemorally cleansingvengeance. But Manhunt offers neither of these things. When he rescues them, apart from barking orders like run away or get out of here, Cash doesnt speak to his family its as if they dont love each other, dont care about each other, dont know each other. Likewise, when theyre killed, the game just continues like nothing happened. Cash keeps following Starkweathers orders. The executions roll in. None of it matters.

And that, I think, is Manhunts greatest achievement. When I see writers or game-makers or whoever it may be talking about nihilism, and how they want to explore hopelessness, immorality,or how everything is pain or something it often feels like a cop out, like theres something easier in making art about how everythings terrible.

But while its certainly nihilistic, Manhunt has a forceful conviction. It takes perhaps the first four levels before it hits the absolute rock bottom of the soul, and then it just keeps digging and digging and digging. Its committed to squalor, sleaze, and spiritual oblivion. For a game about hollowness, and the absence of even the basest humanity, its gotseriousvoice and substance.

Which is why I want it back. By broadening their appeal and softening their approach, videogames, as a commercial prospect and arguably as an artform as well, have done well in the last 20 years. Games have proven to the world to the mainstream cultural vanguard that theyve got some expressive and certainly some industrial worth.

But in doing that, theyve stopped being dangerous. Stopped being iconoclastic. Stopped being appalling. AndI missthat particular creative urge, that urge to be grungy, challenge taste, and rebel against accepted standards of artistic cleanliness. I think that urge once gave to gaming a distinctive cultural identity. And if it did, Manhunt was its apex. Id love to have it back. But Im almost certain it wont happen.

Manhunt 3 might not be coming, but the GTA 6 release date is definitely on its way. In the meantime, if youre still causing chaos in Los Santos, check out the best GTA 5 mods for 2023.

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Forget GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption, I want Manhunt 3 - PCGamesN

Gabriel Krauze's extra-curricular activities were a little different from the average English literature student.

While completing his degree at London's Queen Mary College, he was involved in London gang life and living on a notorious estate in South Kilburn.

His debut autobiographical novel Who They Was, which describes this life, was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize.

Gabriel Krauze Photo: supplied

Who They Was isa violent, visceral book withno redemptive arc, Krauze says.

In literature, people are obsessed with these narratives that are redemptive, or with narratives that give them hope and joy, and this really is becoming a tired regurgitation of a kind of unreality that people for some reason, readers, a lot of readers, want to believe in a version of the world which simply doesn't exist.

And it's a false kind of idealism as well, because it means that we don't engage with challenging ideas.

On the nihilism which draws young men to gang life.

If you read the poetry of Homer, if you read the Iliad by Homer, there's this amazing passage, when Achilles is about to go off to battle to fight the Trojans, and his mother says to him, 'listen, if you go off to battle, you're going to die in battle, but your name will live forever.

But if you stay at home, you will live till you're 125 years old, and you'll have grandchildren and great grandchildren. But when you die, no one will remember your name'.

And in the blink of an eye, he says, 'I want to go to battle, I want to die. And I want my name to live forever'.

On why society turns away from the psychological reasons for crime.

Young men exist within this nihilistic psychological mindset, it's a psychological environment as opposed to a physical environment, because it's not as simplistic as saying oh, it's just to do with poverty and deprivation'. It's also to do with the fact that some people are affected by their circumstances. And by the way in which they view the world differently, and they disconnect from other people who don't look at them the same way or, look at the world in the same way as them.

And we don't really investigate in society the psychological environment, or the philosophical makeup of these young men.

We just talk about it in simplistic terms of poverty and crime.

On gang life as a kind of hyper-capitalism.

People often talk about criminality within the context of liberal thinking. And we think about how to solve this problem without realising that when it comes to selling drugs, and being in a gang, and basically being a gangster, having the aspiration to be a gangster it is a form of like really ruthless capitalism, where we realise the way in which you can have a better quality of life, the way in which you can be more socially mobile is just basically to get money.

On becoming sucked into gang life as a teenager.

I was 13 years old, when I first saw somebody get stabbed right in front of me, like literally a metre from me.

And then the next time I saw somebody get stabbed up was two weeks later, and it basically degrades your threshold for violence, it degrades your threshold for being shocked by things.

And before you know it, you're very inured to that, you're very numb to that stuff. And where it shocks other people. It doesn't shock you.

Like me personally, I don't find my book shocking at all, I have to be reminded by the others that is quite a shocking work because of the world it opens a window on to.

On his diamond grill.

When I first moved to South Kilburn, when I was 17 years old, I saw everyone on the block who was making money, getting money selling drugs and everything, had these diamond grillz.

And this is before the days of UK rappers, and rappers in other countries, wearing diamond grillz, it was like a really unique thing to see. It was very niche. And there was only one place in London as well that you could get diamond grillz, there was only one jeweller who was making this, it was a status symbol.

It's also something that's interesting because it exists in this very dark environment, this environment of brutalist concrete towers, it's very ugly, it's grim. And then you suddenly you have these diamonds flashing in faces and there's something beautiful about it as well.

Gabriel Krauze Photo: supplied

On a Nietzschean morality.

There's a quote in the Genealogy of Morality, when Nietzsche says, it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilised animal out of the beast of prey man.

And these young men, and the young men involved in crime, are the beasts of prey who haven't had that instinct bred out of them by culture, by civilisation, by society, they've retained some of that animalistic element within them.

So, discussing matters of remorse, that's like part of a different moral code. And again, the book is about how morality is relative to the level of danger in which you live, if you live in a different context, that's much more dangerous, your moral code is completely different, remorse doesn't come into play.

Because if you are burdened by remorse, every time you did something bad, you'd be incapable of living within that world.

On the redemptive power of art.

The greatest thing, the most powerful thing, that can take you away from the brink is art, art is the closest thing to God, is the closest way in which we get to God or the idea of what God could be, or what God is whether you're religious or not.

"And art can save somebody, because it engages their imagination, and it takes them somewhere else.

On the book and his writing.

I don't believe that I'm a particularly good writer, to be quite frank with you, I don't think the book is particularly good, but it's a personal artistic agony, like I could get the Nobel Prize for literature for this book tomorrow and I would just laugh.

I would just say, you don't really understand what great literature is, because I don't have a great work of literature. It's personal, a personal artistic agony.

On fake authenticity

There was this big push in the British literary scene a few years ago, I remember there was this moment when all the publishers were saying, we want to hear more authentic voices... but they don't really mean authentic across the board, they want versions of authenticity that tick boxes for them, that tick moralistic boxes for them, that also tick boxes in terms of like all these buzzwords and everything you know?

You can see like 100 books getting published now every year which are like powerful explorations, powerful explorations of identity and family, powerful explorations of love, hope and gender, powerful explorations...it's all just buzzwords.

It's just the vomiting up of regurgitated buzzwords that are endlessly recycled. And there's no truth in the desire for authenticity, because there's so many versions of authenticity that are very dark, that are very pessimistic, that are very nihilistic, very uncompromising.

On how long-listing for the Booker has not brought him money.

If I'm quite frank with you, I currently live in poverty. I live in government housing, I have a backlog of rent to pay. I owe the tax man money, when I go shopping for food I have to buy the cheapest products possible because I need to watch the pennies because I've stepped away from the streets.

I know how to get money in the streets, but I stepped away and decided to devote myself entirely to writing and nothing has happened for me financially that I haven't been financially successful at all.

I haven't even earned one royalty check from sales of my book. So, in that sense of success if we're talking about it as if the masses are running to read my book, no they're not running.

But it's fine, it's fine, this is not a complaint as well. I don't want anyone to think that.

Krauze is currently working on his second novel which will be partly set in Ukraine. He is appearing at WORD Christchurch in late August.

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Gabriel Krauze: raw writing from the streets of London - RNZ

What is the ideal man?

This is a question that philosophers have pondered over and riffed on for millennia.

Many philosophers have sketched out a vision of an ideal man who, unsurprisingly, encompasses the values that represent the pinnacle of their philosophical beliefs. These conceptions of ideal men are similar in that they all require reaching beyond human defaults to develop greater excellence, but each differs as to which virtues should be more or less emphasized to achieve that excellence. While none of the ideals can ever be perfectly embodied, they serve as aspirational models, guiding individuals to strive for personal growth and virtuous flourishing.

Below, we explore seven of these conceptions of the ideal man from seven different philosophers.

Note: Understanding these archetypal ideals requires a deep understanding of the philosophies that inspired them. Libraries of books have been written about the philosophies we describe below. For brevitys sake, we dont get into the nuances of these ideal men. But weve provided links to additional resources so you can further explore the ideas behind them. Hopefully, these short sketches will inspire you to learn more!

Plato, the renowned ancient Greek philosopher, proposed an ideal man known as the philosopher-king. In his seminal work, theRepublic, Plato aimed to define justice and outline the structure of a model society. In his vision, society would be composed of three groups that corresponded to what he believed were the three parts of the soul: the producers, workers who represented base desire; the auxiliaries, soldiers who representedthumos, or spiritedness; and the guardians, warrior-leaders who represented reason.

Philosophers-kings would be chosen from the guardian class after a long and rigorous education and testing process, which Plato likened to refining gold. During their formative years, the guardians would cultivate the physical and mental faculties necessary for their future roles, beginning with a focus on gymnastics and music. As they matured, they would delve into the study of war, politics, Socratic dialogue, and the Forms the abstract and eternal concepts that underpin reality. Once they reached the age of thirty-five, a test would determine the most qualified candidates for leadership positions within the city. Service in these leadership roles acted as another test to identify potential philosopher-kings. The guardians who excelled in these roles would be selected to be philosopher-kings at around age fifty.

The philosopher-kings extensive education would equip him not only with the skills of governance, but also with a deep understanding of eternal ideals, particularly the Form of the Good. This knowledge would enable him to lead with wisdom and justice and make decisions that benefited society as a whole.

Further Resources:

Aristotle, Platos famed student, presents a different ideal man in hisNicomachean Ethics. Aristotles concept of the ideal man is the great-souled man or the magnanimous man. For him, the pinnacle of manliness was the achievement of eudaimonia, a state of flourishing. For Aristotle, eudaimonia required not just excellence in virtue, but excellence in everything else: health, wealth, beauty, friendship, speaking, and more. Aristotles great-souled man embodies excellence in both inward traits and outward qualities.

The great-souled man has a measured sense of pride. He takes pride in his virtues and achievements, focusing only on significant accomplishments rather than trivial matters.

Moreover, the great-souled man maintains a sense of honor; he not only cultivates excellence for excellences sake, but he expects and values the recognition of his excellence by others. Not just any others, however; the great-souled man seeks the respect of those he considers his equals. He doesnt care about garnering the approval of the masses.

Aristotles ideal man also exhibits the type of courage Ernest Hemingway called grace under pressure and remains calm and dignified in the face of setbacks.

In his interactions with others, the great-souled man displays magnanimity. He ignores slights and doesnt hold grudges. He refrains from gossiping and talking ill of others. While the great-souled man avoids thinking and speaking poorly of others, hes also reluctant to offer praise, as that would be seen as subservient. Whats more, hes quick to grant favors, but avoids asking for them, as that too would signal his inferiority.

In short, the ideal Aristotelian man is a virtuous aristocrat.

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Confucius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, emphasized the cultivation and performance of proper social conduct and virtues. In Confucianism, the ideal man is known as ajunzi, often translated as a gentleman or an exemplary person.

Ajunzi demonstrates noble behavior and comports himself appropriately in all situations. The Confucian gentleman shows respect and deference to his elders and teachers while treating those beneath him with humanity. He observes societys rituals and forms with sanctity and circumspection. He embodiesren, or consummate conduct, which is a power that inspires others to be good and noble through ones example. Thejunzis actions uplift and ennoble others, encouraging them to do their own part to maintain social harmony.

The Confucian gentleman continually seeks self-improvement. He engages in book study and seeks to apply his knowledge in practical situations. Confucius believed that with dedication and the cultivation of consummate conduct, any individual could become ajunzi, contributing to the betterment of society through his exemplary behavior.

Unlike the Aristotelian great-souled man, the Confucian gentleman adopts a humble orientation. He avoids excessive pride, recognizing its potential to disrupt social order.

Further Resource:

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German existential philosopher of the 19th century, introduced his famous ideal man the bermensch or Superman in his workThus Spoke Zarathustra.

For Nietzsche, becoming an bermensch is a spiritual goal or way of approaching life. The way of the bermensch is filled with energy, strength, risk-taking, and struggle. He represents the drive to strive and live for something beyond oneself while remaining grounded in earthly life (theres no room for other-worldly longings in Nietzsches ideals).

In a modern world where God is dead and meaning gone, the bermensch creates his own meaning. Instead of feeling dread that life has no inherent purpose, the bermensch finds the process of meaning-creation joyful. He embraces the challenge of fashioning his own purpose with laughter.

The bermensch is really the full manifestation of Nietzsches will to power: the drive to assert oneself in the world to be effective, leave a mark, become something better than you are right now, and express yourself.

Nietzsche never states exactly what the ideal man should strive for beyond himself or what he should create. Being filled with the creative force was the important thing. Each individual must determine his own path into the transcendent.

Further Resources:

The ideal man for the Stoic philosophers was something called the Stoic sage. While all the Stoics touched on and described the sage, Arius Didymus, a Stoic philosopher and the teacher of Caesar Augustus, did the most to flesh out this ideal. His descriptions of the sage were quoted at length in a 5th-century book by Joannes Stobaeus that compiled extracts of the works of Greek and Roman philosophers.

The Stoic sage represents the perfect embodiment of Stoic principles, characterized by the alignment of his life with nature. The sages life is tranquil, guided by virtue, and free from disturbances caused by external circumstances. He recognizes that external factors, such as wealth or reputation, are beyond his control and therefore not essential for happiness. Instead, the sages happiness, his eudaimonia, stems solely from the cultivation of virtue and the correct understanding of mental impressions.

Further Resources:

Albert Camus was a French existential philosopher, novelist, and playwright. His most important contribution to existential philosophy was his idea of the absurd. For Camus, the absurdity of life is created by the juxtaposition of two ideas: 1) the universe is inherently meaningless and indifferent to human concerns, and 2) humans have an innate drive to find meaning in life.

Camus ideal individual, the absurd man, confronts the absurdity of existence with defiance and lives authentically in the face of meaninglessness. He is able to acknowledge the existential emptiness of the world without succumbing to despair or nihilism. He embraces the void directly with passion and joy. He rejects the illusion of imposed order, and in fact finds meaning in this very act of rebellion. He creates his own purpose and lives in the moment.

Camus laid out his ideal of the absurd man in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. In the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time he reaches the top. For Camus, Sisyphus embodies the human condition: our endless search for meaning is as futile as Sisyphus eternal task. But Camus imagines Sisyphus as bearing a smile as he descends to retrieve the boulder, suggesting that theres a kind of triumph, dignity, or even happiness in fully acknowledging the absurdity of life and choosing to push on regardless.

Sren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish father of existentialism, described his ideal man as the Knight of Faith. In his workFear and Trembling, Kierkegaard explores the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate this archetype.

Kierkegaard contrasts the Knight of Faith with another type of individual: the Knight of Infinite Resignation. The Knight of Infinite Resignation renounces worldly attachments and makes great sacrifices for a higher cause or ideal. He resigns himself to these losses and finds peace by letting go of finite and earthly desires.

The Knight of Faith, however, goes beyond resignation and maintains an unwavering belief that he can still receive what he sacrificed due to his absolute faith in God. Abraham was a Knight of Faith because he simultaneously gave up Isaac for sacrifice while still believing that God would allow him to keep his son.

The Knight of Faith embraces the happiness to be found in the finite while also believing in the reality of the infinite and the power of the infinite to make seemingly impossible things possible. To become a Knight of Faith, one must demonstrate faith through action, as Abraham did when he raised his dagger to sacrifice his son. The Knight of Faith takes bold leaps into the unknown.

Further Resources:

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The Ideal Man According to 7 Different Philosophers - Art of Manliness

Neon

Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Even before I saw this movie, I thought it had a good chance of being the film of the year. Of the decade, even. I wondered if this might even feel like the first movie of the 21st century, zeitgeist-wise. Like, in 2099, when we start looking back at what the past hundred years had been about, the ideas that had shaped it, will historians and culture-watchers point to this movie and say, This is where things really kicked into gear?

I think this is entirely plausible. I also hate that it requires a shit-ton of optimism to even suggest that. And now that Ive seen the movie, I believe my pre-screening suppositions remain credible.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Its an incendiary title for an incendiary film. Its a little bit like a horror flick, in that its about a varied group of young people who get together and find themselves in a dangerous situation in which they might be killed. The situation is both of their making and not of their making. The nice green planet theyre living on, with its temperate climate and drinkable water and breathable atmosphere, is being trashed beyond all recognition by people older and more powerful than they are. So they decide to express their displeasure with their environmental inheritance being destroyed in the only way left to them: by fucking shit up, violently.

The planet is Earth, of course, in the here and now. I dont mean to suggest that the film pretends to be science fiction or that it withholds this information. It doesnt. It starts off feeling like a low-key drama about disaffected young people the likes of which weve seen plenty before, only not with the stakes this high. I am trying to impart to my global-warming-denying, or just plain inexcusably fucking complacent, Gen X peers and those older than us that, in many ways that really matter, we are bequeathing to future generations including those already alive, like the characters in this movie a planet that is already intrinsically alien to human life as it has existed since we evolved into something like our current form.

This was inspired by the 2021 book of the same name by Andreas Malm, which is not a novel but a nonfiction manifesto about how the time for nice gentle placid protest has passed, and now its time to violently let the fossil-fuel industry know that their vampire-capitalist bullshit is no longer welcome. So all the characters here are invented for the film, played by a deliciously diverse array of fab young actors: Ariela Barer (who also co-wrote the script), Forrest Goodluck; Jayme Lawson, Sasha Lane, Marcus Scribner. Beautifully, not a lot of infodumping is going on in this movie we are mostly left to figure it out but we can see that for the most part, these are young people from nonwhite backgrounds, some seemingly indigenous, who have not been served well by the supposed American dream. (The oil pipeline they are planning to blow up is in Texas.) Theres one character, a rancher played by Jake Weary, who is white, about whom it might be easy to assume that he is a Republican and maybe he is! though nothing is mentioned on this matter that I can recall but even he is unhappy with the oil company that wants to despoil his land with the pipeline These Kids Today are working together to blow up.

So, like, when carbon crimes hit home, there is little difference between left and right. And carbon crimes are hitting home everywhere now.

Pipeline is a heist drama, and an incredibly tense and intense one. But this is a movie that transcends mere entertainment, even while it is incredibly entertaining. It is about young people who are enormously desperate, and who have nothing to lose, because their elders have specifically engineered a cultural and physical environment that makes them desperate and that has left them no other options. We dont have time for divestment, one kid says. We need to show how vulnerable the oil industry is, another kid says.

I say kid, but only because Im old and theyre young. They are adults who fully comprehend the future they are facing. This is a movie about how nihilism is optimism. Are they gonna blow themselves up in the process of manufacturing their own improvised explosives, one kid wonders? I dont really care, another says with a resigned shrug. They have no other choice. Nihilism is optimism now.

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Review: In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, nihilism is optimism - Detroit Metro Times

Australian horror is known for its gore and overall nihilism. Similar to films in the New French Extremity, contemporary Australian horror is marked with a certain kind of meanness where the human body is ripped apart not by the supernatural, but by other human beings. Think of films like Wolf Creek, The Loved Ones, Hounds of Love, and The Nightingale. Sam Curtain is delivering another entry into this particularly disgusting subgenre, aptly titled Beaten To Death. And boy, does that title really say it all. Its a 90-minute excruciating journey where a man (Thomas Roach) goes through perhaps the worst series of events imaginable. This is extreme horror at its best/worst, depending on where you fall in your enjoyment of the subgenre.

The film opens on a bloody scene where the man, Jack, is being, well, beaten to death by another man (Justan Wagner) while a woman lies face down in the corner. Curtain immediately throws us into the wringer with absolutely no warm-up period. He tells us from the jump that this is not going to be a pleasant experience and he doesnt want it to be. While Jack is able to barely escape the beating, he discovers the woman, revealed to be his wife (Nicole Tudor), is dead. And this is just the beginning!

As he runs to find help, he meets neighbor Ned (David Tracy). Thinking hes found salvation, Jack breathes a sigh of relief. But, this is a movie called Beaten To Death and this is only the beginning. Lets just say Ned has other plans for our poor, already-pummeled protagonist. Its the perfect extreme horror twist that digs deep into the horrors that human beings are capable of. Curtain then begins to weave flashbacks with the present to explain how Jack got here, only deepening this tale of misery and the series of poor decisions that brought Jack to this fate.

Splitting the timelines is a smart way to help pad a runtime thats dominated by one man crawling through the Australian Outback while bleeding out and screaming in pain. However, this split does muddle the story a bit despite their attempts to provide more context. It slows the pacing of a film that, while short, could benefit from a shorter runtime. And thats not just because watching one man endure essentially non-stop mental and physical torture for that long is an endurance test. The violence and suffering become repetitive and lose their impact, making parts of Beaten To Death drag.

But no matter whats happening to him, Roach is giving it his all. And as hes on screen for almost the entire runtime, acting in this film seems to be its own kind of torture. Roach is constantly screaming, whimpering, pleading, and acting through enduring the worst pain imaginable, which is no small feat. Its an incredible performance and you almost feel bad for Roach as much as you respect his dedication to playing a man who has been, in fact, beaten to death.

Curtain and co-writer Benjamin Jung-Clarke truly deliver a piece of disturbing extreme horror. Fans of the subgenre will be pleased with the abjection and nihilism on display, but if gore isnt your thing, you wont get much out of Beaten To Death. Ultimately, the film delivers on its titles promise and gives you a non-stop nightmare where skin is ripped, bone is snapped, and spirits are broken.

Beaten To Death will be released later this year by Welcome Villain Films.

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Beaten To Death Review: Disturbing Australian Horror Lives Up To Its Title [Panic Fest 2023] - Dread Central