Terraforming the Desert of the Real

Adam Ray Adkins December 10, 2020

2020. Mixed Media on paper 24×18 in. Appeared in Locust #3.

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Controversy Stage Left: The Tragedy of Edward Bond

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Controversy Stage Left: The Tragedy of Edward Bond

Alexander Billet

Apr 29, 2024

Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.

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Editorial

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Fascist Pizza

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American fascism has a plastic shopping mall nostalgia. It is the fascism, not of a young empire thwarted, but an empire in decline. It is, at one level, a photograph of an abandoned Pizza Hut with the caption “This is what they took from us.”

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The Case for Critical Irrealism

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In the face of this, appeals to normality are, in essence, the toxic optimism of American exceptionalism, the belief that America is somehow above time, above consequence. And though the reality of President Joe Biden has breathed some new life into this myth, make no mistake, it nonetheless wobbles like a drunk trying to walk a tightrope.

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Alexander Billet + Adam Turl

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Critical Irrealist Reading List

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A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.

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In the Marshes

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“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

Adam Marks

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An Attic in Prague, 1939

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Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.

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