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A Martian Radio Original Serial
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I responded to my friend who was asking for tv recommendations, and I got carried away making what I think is too big of a list. Just gonna write a few sentences for each one and I dunno, I guess send it along.
The first time I heard about Game of Thrones, I was in the driver’s seat of a Toyota Camry with some idea of how to drive. My driving instructor was in the passenger seat telling me and the student in the back about this really crazy series. He mentioned that it was a political fantasy book with kings and knights and magic that was referenced but rarely ever shown. He continued to summarize the first book while I tried to focus on keeping us all on the road.
The Great Displacement is a compilation of reports that describe concrete ways that climate change is affecting the U.S. and provides lenses to be able to think about these changes culturally, economically and humanely.
Jake Bittle’s tour of America showcases the wildfires of California, the sinking Florida Keys, Arizona’s disappearing river water and the increasingly inevitable flooding happening throughout America. At the center of these shifting environments are people. Rich people, poor people, resilient people, vulnerable people.
Cult of the Lamb is an incredibly cute rogue-lite game about a demonic lamb prophesied to overcome the false prophets and restore “The One Who Waits” back to power. But before that, you have to grow turnips, build beds and amenities for your followers and occasionally commit ritual sacrifice to keep morale high.
Love in this movie is an elusive thing to try to understand. At times it's abusive. Other times it’s unreciprocated. But in this movie, it is always a hot mess. And for me, the viewer, I like it.
Over the past few months, I’ve tried to drastically reduce the amount of projects I’m working on to reflect on and think about Martian Radio Theatre as a whole, thinking on the question what is Martian Radio Theatre?
The Empathy Exams is a series of essays by Leslie Jamison that complicates our understanding of what it means to try to understand other people and ourselves.
My immediate concern when picking up this book was that it was going to be some kind of self-help text. A kind of instruction on how to be kind. But kindness, from what I remember, is a topic that is rarely touched on in this text. The recurring theme throughout is pain. Physical pain. Mental anguish. Bodies imprisoned. Self-loathing. Partial or total disassociation. Second-hand sympathy. Nostalgia and forgetting, and even joy derived from endurance. Pain, and our relationship to it.
“First off, language is wild. I mean that literally. It’s an old animal that has seen species long since extinct.
As a medium, it is the most collaborative art form, requiring people to make weird sounds with their mouths, with sibilants (s sounds), plosives (b’s, p’s and g’s,) fricatives (v’s and z’s) and all manner of linguistic gabagool, so that we might be heard, and hopefully understood. I imagine a humorous scene with a neanderthal, perhaps with a broken leg, gesturing to a companion to pass the stone. Their companion is a bit thick and doesn’t get what the gesture means as a symbol. Typically the broken legged neanderthal would simply get up and get it, but having lost their individual agency, they must now use symbols, and since gestures alone don’t quite convey their meaning, perhaps pairing them with sounds will. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Do this until understanding dawns on your hairy companion, or until you’ve created German or something.”
“In an alternate future, we’ll collectively break the link between personal productivity and worth. In fact, we’ll just go ahead and break capitalism while we’re at it. Nobody hustles in post-pandemia cripland, because creativity is more important than brand. Nobody needs to work a side gig to pay medical bills, because there are no medical bills.”
“When I was in Portland, I stopped by a few book shops to pass the time and got into conversation with a shop owner about Boss Fight Books. He mentioned that he had contributed to the Kickstarted of this small publisher who wanted to make books about video games, and after the company succeeded in publishing several sessions of books, the store owner bought batches for the store. One of these was a review of Red Dead Redemption by Mark Margini.”
We would climb up the back hill to stand atop the towers and we could see at least a mile out from its summit. We would joke about how the earth was trying to swallow the castle whole to protect the world from its evil. On one occasion my brother even pretended he was being pulled into the ground alongside the castle and we all screamed and laughed at the possibility.
Order. Everything in its place under the last dust.
Have you ever dusted? It is a constant chore. After a day it settles again. After a few days it turns into a coat. And after a little more time, it turns to grime.
Who has time to dust? It's a sincere question. But not a question I'm actually interested in. What I'm actually interested is disorder. Entropy. Things falling apart.
I'm a content creator.
I generate graphics, videos, animations, podcasts, and I'm well on my way to becoming more of a behind the scenes producer. I credit my success to a single principle, which is: To be successful, you have to project success.
Truly, I don't know what everyone's problem is. If you want to have a better life you have to adopt a better attitude. Be a better person. It's as easy as that.
“In 1998, I was in the back of a brown jeep parked in my family’s garage playing with blocks of wood. At four years old, simple shapes were enough to keep me entertained and engaged. I did not need much. Some soft inoffensive foods. Quiet during sleep. The love of my parents. These were enough to keep me full. “
He worked hard under a pulsing sun
Skin hot and dark and getting darker
Sheathing strong muscles that pull and release
The burden of weight
Yesterday, I woke up very early. I was in a lot of pain, curled over cradling my belly. Slowly and carefully I made my way to the kitchen, opened the fridge and cracked a few eggs into a hot pan. When I went back to the fridge, I noticed in the back corner a piece of Tupperware from my former roommate.
“you are always falling somewhere, in low earth orbit, falling towards a surface that never arrives. all you want is the security and surety of the surface, the hard flat infinite ground with which to strike your body at beyond-terminal velocity so you can scatter your bones across flatland like a memory, like ripples in a pond”
Up in my bedroom
I had a poster of Nomar Garciapara
Name like a spell
-
I was not a baseball fan
But my Dad loved it
And what he liked
I liked too
Sometimes I think about the misty past
Before words were used to describe everything
Signify, contain and otherwise compartmentalize
When days were yet to be
The stars. Endless pin pricks. Universal pixels.
Inga Bossanova started counting them and quickly stopped.
Don’t get caught up in counting the countless.
She stood among the lavender by the young elm at the center of the fenced yard. The dozen or so neighborly windows with their lights extinguished. A new moon. Very dark night.
A Martian Radio Original Serial
“In a filmed interview for the art documentary Deco, she touched on her motivations for such presentations, “In my youth I traveled throughout Europe, and never in all my days have I met a more prudish and Puritan people than those of New England. This shame will not do. Not for my art. Not for my paintings. My work is shameless. And I seek shamelessness from all those I collaborate with.””
“Strange Times is a chimerical quarterly print and online blog that features contemporary issues, literature, poetry, opinionated critiques and odd investigations that unravel from the centre of Arkham. It holds in its digital pages contributions from community members, journalists, art connoisseurs, literary experts, scientific amateurs, fools, shamans and other language smiths. We welcome a wide range of thought in this virtual space as we strive to network original sentiments in the area. The job of the editor in the context of this website and magazine is that of curator and kind refiner. In my work I seek to create a coherent, or at least intentionally incoherent, collection that communicates clearly when it wants to and obfuscates when it needs to. Some of our writers write with pseudonyms, alter egos, assumed identities and nomme de guerre’s allowing for freer expression. But while we take no issue with bigfoot sightings and have no qualms with printing tarot readings from our local babadook, we prohibit the proliferation of racism, fascism, homophobia, transphobia and all forms of xenophobia. It is perhaps natural to be afraid of the unknown. We here at Strange Times walk into the unknown.”
“I sometimes wonder if this is my role in life now. Remaining strategically silent on matters of grave importance. My god the things that we have witnessed. What would happen if we were to put them to paper? For so many, these past years have been inconvenient. I don’t like speaking for you, but for me, this has been hell. I used to be unable to sleep lest I tempt some night terror. Now I sleep fine. As sound as a king. And sometimes I wonder if it is because the nightmares have stopped or if my mind has simply become accustomed to the horrors.”
“The bright gray sky began to wane on Arkham as daylife became nightlife. Somewhere upriver two men in coveralls lifted a large vat from the bed of a rusted pick up truck and poured its vile contents into the river with no regard to the diadromous species that would swim through its toxins. In the canals, a gigantic reptile crawled with its slow pale thighs through the shallow muck and floating refuse under Moore’s bridge and eventually into the sewers. Past the densely populated city towards the sloping hills, the woods seemed to stretch in all direction and to the eyes of some, a tall dark mountain loomed over. And in those woods, dark shapes moved under cover of the conifers plotting unknown designs.”
For The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles and his colleagues would take well-known books such as Treasure Island and Dracula and The Man Who Was Thursday and essentially rip them up and remix them into radio dramas. They’d perform these scripts live with a full band and foley artists for the sound effects and the 17th episode of the series was an adaptation of H.G. Welles War of the Worlds. It is famously remembered now as The Panic Broadcast.