RECOVERING THE COSMIC:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MASHA TUPITSYN AND EMMALEA RUSSO

EMMALEA RUSSO: Here's a photograph of sunrise this morning, alongside the first poem in Confetti, which touches on what the alchemists say—that the world and the work begins and ends in the heavy metal lead. Adding these to our ongoing discussion about sunrise and sunset, beginnings and endings:

MASHA TUPITSYN: That’s beautiful. “That we think the sun dumb.” The machine thinks it knows better than the sun. When everyone tags the sun on their Instagram, what does that make of the sun? #Sun. I write about the algorization of the sun in Time Tells, vol. 1, referencing our emails in the summer of 2020. What's great about your sunrise photo here is the sun shows up 3 times, like a skipping stone. Dot dot dot. I wish I could rise as early as you, but most times I go to bed when you're waking up, lol. I’m nocturnal. The other night, I watched three horror movies from the early 1980s. One of them, The Funhouse, was a rewatch. I know you like Tobe Hopper as well. In Funhouse, along with its predecessor, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the horror ends with sunrise, the rising sun of a new day. The world begins anew when the sun rises because horror belongs to the ontology of night. Once upon a time, people walked out of the night of horror, the same way we see them stumble out of the coffin of nightclubs at dawn in 80s movies. People don’t party during the day, right? Clubs are a Persephonic underworld. The Hades of late-stage modernity. In my durational film series, DECADES, I connected sunrise/sunsets and night clubs in the 1980s. The end credits score of The Funhouse also happen to be called Sunrise!

The first seconds sound almost noir, which means dark/black/night—again, the flip side of day.

As you know, I’ve been rereading Bram Stoker’s Dracula as research for the second volume of Time Tells, in which I write about the history of cultural and spiritual vampirism in literature, cinema, and politics. Stoker’s novel is full of references and allusions to the sun. Dracula belongs to “sunset land,” so of course, the entire allegory revolves around an avoidance of the sun. As a predatory entity, Dracula chases the sunset. Francis Ford Coppola smartly picked up on that in his Dracula film (Coppola first uses this technique with his cloud montages in Rumble Fish, 1985. At one point in Dracula, Bram Stoker writes: “and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time.”) by including all kinds of wonderful sped up visual montages of the sun rising and setting. Dracula is a kind of clock. He exists within a dual symbology, operating under the cover of night. He is clandestine. Night shields and hides him. The sun sheds light, exposing him. The sun is therefore a truth that will literally burn him, destroy his power, cast him out.

We know that the sun, like fire, purifies. It melts away the virus of fear and terror that thrives off the dark. The sun gives us energy, the vampire drains our energy. Blood sucking is a metaphor for that. In occultist theory, fire is the key spiritual element; it is at once the purifying light of heaven and the destructive fuel from hell. Dracula has no spirit. Interestingly, Coppola tries to give him spirit by inserting a love story. In his story, Dracula is the ideal (melancholic) lover. As we see in The Funhouse, night is a phantasmagoria that needs to have a light shone on it. “I came here before sundown, for at sundown the Un-Dead can move,” writes Stoker.

Predictably, in defense of so-called climate control, Bill Gates—another vampiric entity—has proposed to blot out the sun. It’s a megalomaniacal destruction and predation of our circadian rhythm, which the blue light of 24/7 digital capitalism has already monetized and disturbed. Gates’s dream is a dream of keeping civilization in the dark. What kind of world is it when we are literally living in the dark in order to “save” it? In Dracula, Dr. Seward observes his “lunatic” patient, RM Renfield’s mysterious afflictions in his diary, asking whether it is the sun and the moon that are affecting his violent moods and inexplicable behaviors: “Can it be that there is a malign influence of the sun at periods which affects certain natures, as at times the moon does others?” Historically, the moon and sun functioned as a symbiotic teleologies of duality. We used to view the sun and moon as emotional states. The wolf howls at the moon, the rooster crows at dusk.

ER: I was reading Dante’s Purgatorio this morning and this question came to me. Sunset has so much to do with rest. Sunset marks the end of daylight and the beginning of another kind of light/life. It's also a formal shift. And you just sent me those incendiary stills from Vampire's Kiss (1988). Dracula, like Purgatorio, has so much to do with finding rest. Those on Mount Purgatory are subject to the purifying fire that you talk about above, as opposed to the damning fire of hell. They climb all day and when the sun sunset, they must rest! What's happening to sunset, to rest, to endings and breath, in the digital world? How do these themes appear in Time Tells, Vol 1.? Confetti searches for these moments of celebration and time-marking, confetti itself being a perishable material that goes high then falls to the ground. I quote Artaud somewhere in there, who said: “Sunset is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.” So this question about endings/sunsets/rest is also a question about loss in the digital world. What we've lost, but also the loss of loss (to quote Mark Fisher) that happens under digital recall.

MT: Confetti has all the colors of the sun. Confetti belongs to day. There’s also the idea that confetti is explosive, right? A colorful burst that is fleeting, like the sped-up way the sun rises and sets in Coppola’s Dracula. It moves fast, like an animal. Is confetti the material of the digital age, where there are only eruptions that have no beginning or ending? Fisher’s loss of loss is born out of Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” a seminal text for me and my work. At Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Zizek told the crowd, “Don’t be afraid to want what you desire.” He was referring to the classic melancholic predicament in which the melancholic holds onto the love object without actually wanting the love object. To not be able to mourn (Freud argues that melancholia is failed mourning) what one has lost is the loss of loss itself, but also the loss of the ability to mourn. One no longer wants to recover what has been lost. I referred to that as digital melancholia in Picture Cycle (2019) and Love Dog (2013).

Counterpoints create an ethical tug of war that can lead us to a life of virtue, meaning, and divinity. But if the binary is eradicated and everything takes on the same flat value and meaning, the logos of doublethink sets in; a radical subjective reality that no one can share. In simple terms, what the digital has taken away, as I write in Time Tells, is precisely the phenomenology of the binary of day and night. Once we lost the binary, we lost dialectics. We lost the coherent and sublimative logic of form. Without the combined charge of positive and negative, we also lose the cosmic. In 1980s cinema, as I’ve written, the binary created invaluable tensions that led to catharsis and taught us how to overcome conflict. It did this through archetypes. Think Breakfast Club. Night and day was a binary. Blonde and brunette. The bully and the nerd. Success and failure. Rich and poor. Dark versus light. Good versus evil. Man and woman. Adult and child. Etc. The binary can offer all kinds of productive tension for understanding difference and alterity.

The loss of the binary in every sense has made things incoherent and much more divisive (not to mention corrupt) because it has made reality umanageably subjective and completely narcissistic. There is no shared or eternal truth. If you want people to go mad, the first thing you do is chip away at the phenomenology of time and the rhythms of the sun. In the same way that coffee disrupted our endocrine rhythms, blue light from smart devices and computers has cannibalized and eroded those bookmarks and markers of time. Being on the computer means you can be anywhere and buy anything, from anywhere in the world, regardless of time and place—what Jonathan Crary calls 24/7 capitalism.

In all of these old movies (unless you’re talking about Bergman or something, who turns bright sunlight into a form of horror. But he’s Scandanavian!), horror belongs to night; salvation, rest, relief belong to the sun. When the sun rises, you are safe again. Dracula knows this too, that’s why he attacks at night. The characters in horror movies prepare for the battle against the monster, which always happens at night. Nightmare on Elm Street’s horror is rooted in the vulnerability of sleep and dreams—maybe Freddie Krueger is just good old fashioned dream work, to use Freud’s term. Those characters are at peril at night. When Ruba survives in Manhunter, and Graham is holding her, it is twilight. The first ray’s of the sun are lifting the dread. It’s a liminal hour. A threshold time. Not quite safe yet. And on and on it goes. In one of your Substack posts on Dante, you called sunrise and sunset, “the main form-markers,” which I loved because I’ve always said the post-digital age has no form. It’s ungraspable. And form always has its parameters. Presentism is always the shapeless Now. The computer and smartphone screen are the greatest weapon against time that we’ve ever experienced. If the industrial revolution created the calendar and universal time—clock time—the computer obliterated shared time. We’re wired for that—for hours and seasons. Our bodies still operate on these ancient biorhythms.

ER: How do you see the eye/I/speaker working in Time Tells? In the book, as in much of your work, personal and cultural memory gets woven together in divinatory ways, like the alchemical-cosmic law of correspondences. And yes, as you mentioned, Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia” feels like a touchstone for your writing. Can you talk about how it's working in Time Tells in particular? And maybe a little about your relationship to both mourning and melancholia? 

MT: Yes, it’s a touchstone. All my work (as well as the forms I use) is about mourning. Tracking and identifying what has been lost. Unlike melancholia, mourning requires work, as Freud explains, making it active and engaged rather than ambivalent or fetishistic. In my writing, I personalize these losses to give them a direct reference—context—but I’m also speaking as a critic looking at the larger world. That is to say, the interface between self and culture. So even when my writing is personal, it is not memoir because I am not interested in revealing who I am in any explicit way. I am not the point. I am simply using my I/eye—and in Love Dog, the material or template of my life—as a kind of divining rod, or steering wheel.

Time is what helps us assess meaning, otherwise you are at the mercy of the Now (Watch this now; Do this now; Buy this now; Be this now), which denies us any peace, coherence, or understanding.

In one of the essays in the first volume of Time Tells, "Past Perfect (Total Recall),” there’s an opening quote by Akira Kurosawa, who told Chris Marker in 1985: “To create something, it must be based on memories.” Time is how deep memories are created. Acceleration and presentism destroy our ability to make lasting memories and bonds. In the streaming age, I remember very little of what I watch, whereas I still vividly recall nearly everything I watched when I was child and teenager—where I was, who I was with, what I was doing and feeling—because all those viewings were so wrapped up in experiences that happened in the lived world, not the virtual world. Those experiences happened over a long period of time. Since everything is happening simultaneously on our devices now, the virtual space constantly trumps lived space—the content and actual experience is secondary. Scrolling teaches us not to care. It’s a flippant, non-committal gesture designed to block lasting memories and attachments from forming. I think it’s one of the reasons narcissism is so rampant in the social media age because the relational affect is one-sided, self-oriented, predatory, mediated, exhibitionist. The virtual world values quantity and speed over slowness and quality. As the writer Celia Farber put it on her Substack, The Truth Barrier, “the digital pollution device already has us half cut off. Cell phones—we are each in a cell, like a prisoner.” The smartphone is the antithesis of an inner life, of interiority. And without an inner life, there is no contemplation or freedom. No understanding or appreciation of the world around us. No lived time—what the Greeks called kairos, which means the right time, the opportune time. Today, the right time is always now.

To answer the second part of your question, in my film classes, I always began with what I’ve termed “Male Melancholia.” This consisted of a close analysis of Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” I then extended the essay to perform a critical reading of not just the profound apathy and melancholia (failed mourning) of contemporary technofeudal culture, but the infrastructural biotech-systems that have trained us to become pathologically melancholic—and manic, the flipside of melancholia. I refer to this as “digital melancholia,” something I write about in Time Tells as well as the book that preceded it, Picture Cycle (2019). We’ve repackaged the kind of algorithmic response to loss, armoring ourselves against it with melancholia and technocracy.

To me, cultural criticism must be a modality of the work of mourning. In order to be ethical and truly attentive to the bombastic, soulless world around us, with its never-ending assaults and psyops on meaning, reality, and truth, it must be. Melancholia is also interesting because it poses as self-awareness but is really self-absorption and self-torment at the expense of others. Freud writes: “The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without a doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate… It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting—and so dangerous.” I think Freud would read the self-awareness of outrage culture as mania. That’s why victim status has become such an important disregulating social weapon.

Like night and day, mourning and melancholia form a composite ontology. They are different but connected.

ER: What you're describing here: the binary and those counterpoints which engine an ethical tug of war disappearing, dispersing, flattening — is exactly what Confetti is trying to think through. At times, it performs and delves into this dispersion/confusion, and at other times, it tries to clear it away. I never want to operate from a place of judgement in my work, as poetry gets dull when the speaker becomes a spokesperson or tries to tell the reader what to think. So, there is participation in the dross and chaos. Maybe towards something like inoculation, at times. The book begins with a quote from Deleuze's Cinema 1, which is maybe annoying, but I think it’s beautiful: “It is the hour when it is no longer possible to distinguish between sunrise and sunset, air and water, water and earth, in the great mixture of a marsh or a tempest.” One place this tug of war between darkness and light plays out in ancient astrology, is the zone/time just prior to sunset. This is known as the 8th house, where the sun is both yearning to set and wanting to stay up above the horizon. This feels like a very human push-pull and an ambivalence (simultaneous conflicted feelings). How is this sort of ambivalence different from/similar to the ambivalence of melancholia that you talk about? I'm thinking, for instance, of something Byung-Chul Han writes about communication in the internet age in Topology of Violence:

The imperative for transparency accelerates communication by eliminating all negativity, which would otherwise necessitate lingering, pausing, or hesitating. Communication reaches maximum speed where the same answers to the same, where a chain reaction of the same takes place. Otherness, in contrast, delays it. Transparent language is a mechanized, functional language completely lacking ambivalence. The diktat of transparency annihilates the vague, the opaque, the complex. Counting is more transparent than recounting. Addition is more transparent than narration.

Han's take on the kind of delay and opacity that's involved in otherness/eros (in contrast to the transparent or immediately digestible) feels related to much of what you’re dealing with in Time Tells. Love and waiting. In “Green Scene” you write that the green scene is also “the materiality of celluloid, of different exposures.” Later in that same essay, which is a kind of woven meditation on waiting, materiality, and the color green, you quote John Berger: “The ephemeral is not the opposite of the eternal. The opposite of the eternal is the forgotten.” Can you talk a little about the color green, perishability, and the eternal as the opposite of the forgotten? 

MT: Right, I think what Han means is that is by being able to send and receive—say and express—whatever we want at all times, we have lost the valuable dialectic of having and not having. The gap or interstice of waiting, which creates, as I write in “Green Scene,” a powerful yearning for and fidelity to the love object. This yearning and fidelity (Fanny Howe: “mourning teaches you to love without the object”) and vigilance is the opposite of melancholia, which fetishizes an attachment to the loss of the object. The melancholic doesn’t really want what he desires. He has also incorporated that loss into his ego.

You read my chart in the summer of 2020, so maybe you recall that I have an 8th house stellium in Aries. Deleuze’s “hour” here is like Bergman’s hour of the wolf. A short eternal increment of time that stands for a new era. Without a phenomenology of time, we cannot understand what is happening to us. We cannot process it or mourn it. That’s what “Green Scene” is about. The color green stands for that which is eternal, renewable, and uncorruptible. Is that why money is green (Bresson’s L’Argent comes to mind here. The corruption of green)? Money as life, a false principle. The internet age can be summarized, to quote the Catholic theologian and philosopher Fulton J. Sheen, as “the decline of the spirit of discipline.” There is a long tradition, as I note in “Green Scene,” of the cultural and literary observance of the color blue as an elegiac metaphor for loss. But it is harder to be green than it is to be blue. Especially once you’ve been jaded or seduced into nihilism.

All the chapters in Time Tells are formally organized around different kinds of concepts, motifs, and idioms of time. I did this because we haven’t just lost a phenomenology of time, we have lost an entire language around time and metaphysics—time in love, time in cinema, time in music. A language that was once central to the grammar of cinema and literature. If we don’t know how to speak about something, we cannot understand it. We cannot live it. I don’t even necessarily mean an analytical language here, I mean something intuitive. Like the seasons. Yes, there all kinds of metaphysical associations with seasons and what they mean—winter is death, hibernation, hermitage; spring is rebirth, etc.—but we don’t need to theorize about seasons to understand and honor their role in our life.

Because we live on the internet, we have stopped drawing parallels between ourselves and nature, and the more we do that, the more confused we are because without God, without nature, without time, how do we understand the phases of our life? If you can appreciate what winter does, and that what winter does isn’t what summer does, then you can take on the lessons of those months instead of complaining about how it’s cold outside. I think that is why so many people are flocking to astrology, as we’ve discussed—because it revolves around transits. The digital collapses and erodes distinctions between everything, including perversion and morality, lying and truth, the self and other.

In “Interlude” I write about the way everyone seemed to be on YouTube during lockdown in 2020 crying over the time of music or the music of time—something I meditate on throughout Time Tells. Music takes us places through genetic memory—both personal and collective—which makes it a time machine. Whereas cinema connects us with the image of our ideal life, our ideal self. I am speaking about these two mass art forms in the past (the 20th century). I think they’re both more or less dead now in the populist, mainstream sense.

One of the questions in Time Tells—and Love Dog too—is where are we when we listen to music? Music, unlike most things today, is simultaneously a bridge between the present and the past. It locates our memories while also transporting us beyond a specific time and place. Music is teleportive, it is time travel. As I write in the book, the work of mourning in 2022 became the remembrance of music. During COVID lockdown people of all ages, were searching for old music videos specifically (70s, 80s, 90s) to mourn a lost time. A lost world. Some of that was what the Portuguese call saudade, a longing for something one never had. A time one never lived. I don’t think that’s simply nostalgia, retromania, or fetishizing the past, because the longing went beyond the music or the fetishization of the musician. It was really about feeling time.

When the world was taken away from people, music, which people had historically shared before it became trapped in blue tooth ear buds and shuffled around on Spotify by the algorithm, became something so much bigger than any other visual medium can offer. As I write in “Interlude,” no one was talking about movies this way. Most young people do not watch old movies, but they did seem to be gravitating to old music for the sole purpose of recovering and remembering something. By watching old concerts on YouTube, they were intuiting something wrong with the present world—something spiritually lacking and out of whack. Is that all to do with the algorithm leading them? Maybe. But there is a kind of divination happening that’s leading them there even in the midst of that rigged predatory search engine. YouTube music videos became SOS’s and lifelines people were throwing to one another in the comment sections. It’s because we have lost transcendence and coherence that everyone flocked to (old) music during COVID, a time of extreme government control, corruption, and censorship.

To understand what was happening to the present, people went back to the past to try to make sense of things. To feel free. Normally this kind of respect for time (suddenly everyone felt it because they were under lockdown and were waiting—this kind of pause is completely absent from digital life). This made me think about what music tells us about time. What interested me about this besides the emotion of it was that everyone seemed to just intuitively understand, as they do about smartphones, that there is something profoundly lonely, alienating, and schizoid about the way we live now, and music was able to offer an antidote. Some framework, some relief. Even very young people, who are very entrenched in the presentist excesses of online life, know that all these screens are keeping them from truly experiencing happiness, coherence, integration, and connection, and because of that they wanted to rewind to a different age. There were so many teenagers and people in their 20s wishing for this in the YouTube comments. The question is: what were they missing? What were they seeing in the past that made them want to be there?

A song is a very interesting agent and demarcation of time. As I write in “Interlude,” a song’s duration is very deceptive. It may technically only be 2 minutes, but at its best, its brevity contains multitudes of time and space—like that line from Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) that I quote In Time Tells in the form of a screenshot: “What’s a song anyway? How long does it last?” Nothing else is like music in this sense. You can evoke anything in a song—or you used to be able to anyway—but are bound to all kinds of rules and restrictive logic in other art forms. A lyric is a very elusive thing, more than even poetry. You don’t need to know anything to access music. A lyric is so personal and yet completely impersonal—it’s for everyone. A melody can instantly conjure so many things—times and places. Music hits the soul, like love. As I write in “Past Perfect (Total Recall)”: “What I love most about music is it says what it means, even if the singer doesn’t mean it, or doesn’t know how to mean it, or isn’t ready to mean it, or isn’t allowed to me it. Music is meaningful in a way that nothing is meaningful.” In other words, because music is eternal and makes us feel so much so quickly, because it is spiritual, because it is cathartic, music knows better than us what things mean. Because of its healing vibration (especially when it was tuned to a 432 Hertz frequency, the natural frequency of our planet—today everything is tuned to 440, which is a military frequency of chaos, and confusion). Good music gives us health, Nietzsche said.

Is confetti analogous to the Event for you? What speed is confetti? What kind of time is it?

ER: I think of confetti as the ungraspable throw, the perishable substance that marks celebration, holiday, time passage or stamp, and which also holds the aftermath of the event as remnant, fragment, or gross glimmer on floor that we walk over and barely notice. So, confetti time is at least double. And the book oscillates between perishability and eternality, the profane and the sacred. The book’s opening sequence is called “Honey in Tea,” and deals with duration, melting, memory. The name Confetti is inspired, among other things, by something the installation artist Joelle Tuerlinckx said about her use of confetti in her work – that it is a way to “do cinema, but in space….” I was thinking about confetti as a material and a metaphor for the total dispersion we are now experiencing. The lack of boundaries between screens and daily life, fiction and non. I wondered if confetti could become both the marker/memory and the dissolve. The language in the poems performs this confetti-ness: clusters, thins out, goes up and down, gets dense and thins out.

You mentioned in an email once that the second volume of Time Tells, which is forthcoming, might be your last book. How do you feel culture has changed since your first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters, came out?

MT: This is a very complicated question, but I think it’s changed enormously. First, I don’t think there is a Culture anymore, perhaps there never was, save a few canaries in the coal mine doing real work for the right reasons. Culture has been replaced by ideology. Artists have been replaced by ideologues. Second, Beauty Talk & Monsters is about the aesthetics of corruption—something I have been thinking deeply about in some form or another all my life. But I wrote Beauty Talk as a very young person and thinker in my 20s. At that time, the covert binary still existed. The 20th century abided by a behind-the scenes ideology (onscreen and offscreen are a theatrical and political trope I used throughout Beauty Talk). That means the presentation of a basic public morality was required in order to hide the immorality behind the scenes. The culture is too eroded and degraded for decoys and coverups. Corruption is in the open now. The illusion has become real, or as Frederick Jameson put it about Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, “connotation relaxes into overt denotation.”

Back in 2005, when I wrote Beauty Talk, I thought the problem was that we weren’t being told the truth about the Hollywood/media system, and because of that, the onscreen was the less important story than the offscreen story. So I went behind the curtain and tried to narrativize that. However, I was naïve about the full extent of the cryptocracy. We didn’t have the internet that we have now, or the wide availability of citizen journalists. But what I didn’t know, I always felt. I thought if you just exposed or disclosed that truth the corruption would be remedied. That was naive. I didn’t understand that the people involved knew what was being hidden. Nor did I understand the huge, multi-pronged machinery that was fueling that coverup. I didn’t understand that Hollywood was not its own system, but a subservient system beholden to and subsidized by many other systems. I didn’t understand the chain of command, as it were. I only understood the problem in parts. I understood the patterns intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, but not politically or historically. But that’s okay—I still think Beauty Talk is a very radical, free, outspoken book, and again, I was young, so it was good to be naïve as well, or I would have become too heartbroken to function. I now have the strength and maturity to understand the things I know.

Now we disclose and weaponize the lie. At least with the era of the cover (however false and evil) we were advancing a unifying ideal, a standard. Or so we thought. Now only ideology, degradation, and destruction sell. There is no unifying standard or canon, there is only the collective lowering of standards. This phase really began with the era of Reality TV in the early 2000s. The social experiment (see Yuri Behezemov’s “The 4 stages of ideological subversion”) of Reality TV has desocialized and decivilized us. It gave Hollywood, media, and big tech a sense of exactly what kind of exploitation, indoctrination, and debasement they could get away with. We have ended up with the theater of “transparency,” which is a much more powerful and divisive weapon than the theater of decency. Transparency is a doublethink cover for fraudulence. Corruption and ideology are sold to us as art and liberation because we live in a culture of total dishonesty, and that includes intellectual and aesthetic dishonesty. In ACTING, vol 2 of Time Tells, I write about the price of the loss of coherence and truth. Now—and in Beauty Talk—I see both as an absence of basic unity and integrity. Obviously, we need the expulsion of the art of sublimation, something I argue we’ve completely lost in today’s culture. With the internet, we’ve lost the art of using art as a form that contained and organized our expression.

So the reason I said the Time Tells volumes may be my last books is because I honestly believe, at least for now, that these end days of culture are beyond interpretation. This world is too corrupt now to dignify with interpretation. It doesn’t deserve it! You cannot advance truly innovative ideas and works of integrity about a culture that is fundamentally rotten and compromised. You need a new epoch. A rebirth. How can you make art out of something that no longer has any artistic or moral merit? How can you function as a critic, thinker, or artist when all cultural institutions demand that you participate in the degradation and suppression of truth? You can’t without being compromised yourself. You get socialist realism. You get art that serves the State. In Beauty Talk, I still believed that the world I lived in deserved to be critiqued. Now I think art has to take a back seat to resisting and overturning global tyranny in order to make the world new. We can write poetry again after we win the fight. To put it succinctly, what I’m talking about is the evolution and destruction of the cryptocracy, which is thankfully now ending. But its ending puts art on hold as a response to it. Now is not the time for art or personal success. Now is the time for solutions.





MASHA TUPITSYN is a writer, critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of several books, most recently Picture Cycle (Semiotexte/MIT, 2019). Her films include, the 24 hour Love Sounds (2015), DECADES, an ongoing film series, The Musicians (2022), and Bulk Collection (2022). Her website is:  https://www.mashatupitsyn.com/.

EMMALEA RUSSO’s books of poetry are Confetti (2022), Wave Archive (2019), and G (2018). Her website is https://emmalearusso.com/.

Home for the Holidays, 1995, from Time Tells, Vol. 1., Film Desk Books.

Vampire’s Kiss, 1995.

Vampire’s Kiss, 1989.

November 22, 2022, 7:01am, Jersey Shore.

from Confetti, Hyperidean Press.