Detail from the title sequence of Peter Chungโs รon Flux.
What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the processโchildren are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodleโs fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand titleโโPessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Willโโfrom Gramsciโs Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the videoโs banal footage to Arvo Pรคrtโs solemn โCantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,โ complete with periodically tolling bell.
The videoโs appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTokโgrand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Partonโs โJoleneโ becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of Whiteโs video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the videoโs contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when youโre watching itโfeel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.
Iโve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fishโs bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded manโs camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented troutโand I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at playโfor them, itโs water pushing one way; for me, itโs the musicโs command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I donโt like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe Iโm a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and Iโve accepted a certain kind of banality, thatโs when Iโm out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.
โKirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader
Barn sour, an equestrian term, describes a domesticated horse who doesnโt want to leave its home. A barn sour horse will resist being taken from its stable, often violently. If they are forced out, they might bolt back home, throwing their rider off their back, sometimes trampling them. The term has been taken as the name for a mysterious sound-collage artist from Winnipeg, Canada. I came across Barn Sourโs tape horses fucked over the head with bricks in late 2019, on which sparse harmonies on a detuned piano are dubbed over recordings of manic laughter and guttural glossolalia. It is just under nine minutes long, incredibly disturbing, and absolutely mesmerizing. It was released under two pseudonyms, one of which is C. Lara, the name of a real racehorse. The other is James Druck, a long-dead fraudster implicated in a scheme to kill show horses in order to collect insurance money. (James Druckโs daughter, whose childhood horse was among the horses killed, is also the inspiration for a central character in Jay McInerneyโs novel Story of My Life.)
I feel like Iโm watching scenes from a horror movie on a deteriorating VHS tape in a large, cold, empty house: the gruesome images are hard to make out; I canโt tell if the fuzziness is making the experience more or less fascinating or nauseating. Most of Barn Sourโs releases have titles invoking an esoteric reference to equine terminology. Soap & Glue, their compendium album, released by Penultimate Press this year, takes its name from two products historically made from ground-up horse parts. Itโs a suitable name for the album, which is full of reworkings and rebludgeonings of their previously released materialโbut also because it is billed as Barn Sourโs final release, their death, their body of work ground to a pulp. Join them for a final foal-y ร deux before they trot back to their barn for good.
โTroy Schipdam, reader
While visiting my hometown this winter, mildly jet-lagged, I started waking up at 4 A.M. To kill time before the sun rose, Iโd watch an animated sci-fi show from the early nineties. รon Flux (1991-1995)โwhich first aired as a series of six experimental films on MTVโs late-night showcase for indie animatorsโis perfectly suited for the borderland between dreaming and consciousness. In the iconic title sequence, an insect lands on a womanโs cheek and crawls into her open, pupilless eye only to be captured in its lashes, as in a Venus flytrap, when the lids snap shut. The eye reopens and the pupil swivels into place, bringing its prey into focus. Many of the elements that earned the show its cult following are there in the intro: hallucinatory images, biopunk body augmentation, a bit of eroticized violence. Set in an ultramodern dystopia, รon Flux follows the titular character, a femme fataleโtype (slicked-down black hair, violet irises, bondage gear) who works as an assassin for the resistance. We quickly learn that รon is a morally ambiguous antiheroine traveling between two competing societies: the anarchic Monica and the technocratic police state Bregna, ruled by an Aryan-blond despot (and รonโs nemesis-lover) called Trevor Goodchild. รon is frequently killed and reincarnated before the credits roll.
รon Flux is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Its early episodes are free of dialogue and instead rely heavily on clusters of impressions and shifts in perspective. Influenced by Egon Schiele, the French cartoonist Moebius, and manga artists like Kazuo Umezu and Osamu Tezuka, the creator and director Peter Chungโs style is defined by expressive lines. He prioritizes evocative character designโelongated, sinewy figures, angular architectureโover surface detail. The series is a combination of fetish content, classic sci-fi, and, according to some fan theories, Gnostic symbolism. In one episode, the body of a soldier is reanimated so his belly can be used to gestate a godlike being with an iridescent halo. In another, a womanโs shattered vertebra is surgically removed, allowing her to rotate her body a full 360 degrees, and replaced with a device that reseals her spinal column with the push of a button. Late in the series, รon clones her own body in a biotech laboratory, and, in a campy allusion to Narcissus and his reflection, she kisses her surrogate self as she emerges from a pool of water.
Consuming a nonstop stream of images like this for a few hours each morning, under my parentsโ roof once more, left me feeling delirious and impossibly old. But Chungโs characters, with their contortionist acrobatics and cyberpunk experiments, also plucked the string inside me that tethers me to my kid self, the one who read books about dystopian futures, kissed girls in their bedroom once their parents had gone to sleep, and tried to decide what they wanted to do with their body.
โJay Graham, reader