OUTWARD BOUND TO INNERVISION
KNIFEPOINT #1 — NOVEMBER 2023
The days are short and gray. The nights are sharp and electric. There's something out there, buzzing in dark wires. It's a spitting, writhing kind of thing; neon prophecy from binary entrails.
THREE YEARS AGO, I wouldn't have guessed that Blood Knife would still be going, much less releasing its third annual state of cyberpunk issue. This one grew in the telling—we went from four articles down to three then somehow up to six.
(I also wouldn't have guessed it would take me 3 years to finally do the newsletter I planned to do from day one.)
If you haven’t dug into the new issue yet, check out (CYBER)PUNK IS DEAD by the esteemed Molly Noise.
(And if you want to see how far we’ve come, you might go read the first piece we ever published: NO, IT’S NOT CYBERPUNK.)
***
AS FOR THE NATURE OF THIS PARTICULAR BEAST — there's no real plan, not yet. Expect some links, some recommendations, and some knife business (as it were). One more lone shout in the digital night.
Email made sense, though, as everything else falls apart. It’s a funny medium: the last and perhaps most venerable cog of this new machine, still spinning deep in some ancient gearbox while the rest of it is in a perpetual state of re-engineering and decay. Social media is collapsing inward like a dying star; we're just trying to get a safe distance from the event horizon. (Now there's a movie.)
But the internet has always been a series of dead platforms, stacked one atop another like the nested middens of some ancient city-mound. Bulletin boards, Usenet, then IRC, MUDs; then on to MMOs and forums, then a parade of social media and chat programs that came tumbling down before the paint was even dry. At a certain age you're supposed to jump off the train and lie down in the gravel til the next generation runs you over.
THANKS, BUT NO THANKS. There's still strange alleys to walk down, new dawns to see with old eyes, forbidden tracts as yet unread and untrammeled. And someone's got to stand by the door to show the new arrivals where the exit is.
***
WHAT’S NEXT? We’ve got some new release movie reviews coming up soon. And there’s two issues of the Blood Knife podcast in the chamber and ready to go. We’ll also be putting out a call for pitches for our Frontier issue in the next couple days.
If you have ideas, you know where to find us.
***
Here's some cool and/or weird shit to occupy the dark hours.
Decoder [1984]
A MAD GRABBAG OF INDUSTRIAL MUSICIANS, student radicals, and proto-cyberpunks (including Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge and William S. Burroughs) colliding in a run-down electro-industrial hell. Acoustic weapons drive shoppers into violent frenzies; fast food workers execute military drills; back-alley stalkers scavenge chemical landfills against the too-real backdrop of postwar Hamburg. Pure DIY cyberpunk, but not for the faint of heart: their throw-it-and-see-what-sticks approach encompasses actual riots, post-mortem castration, and some rather upsetting business with frogs. (It’s on Tubi, because of course it is.)
Outlaw: Gangster VIP (「無頼」より 大幹部, Burai yori daikanbu) [1968]
PART SERGIO LEONE, PART ZATOICHI, part Melvilleian crime epic. A sadsack philosophizing yakuza hitman bounces from one doomed girlfriend to the next (all implausibly played by Chieko Matsubara), hacking and slashing his way through the postwar Japanese underworld with nothing more than a tantō and a bad attitude. Watch for dizzying knife fights in the rain, blaring Morricone horns, and high melodrama. (Start with GORO THE ASSASSIN or BLACK DAGGER. They’re technically the fourth and fifth films, but Goro strides ex nihilo into each. Continuity is for other people.)
Scavengers Reign [2023]
MEGACORPORATE COST-CUTTING leaves the crew of a deep-space hauler stranded on a Moebius-inspired scifi wonderworld. Biology pulses, oozes, and writhes; electronics spark and smoke, with shades of Zelazny, Moorcock, and (maybe?) Le Guin. Like injecting the sci-fi New Wave directly into your optic nerve, with a chaser of Airtight Garage. Beautiful and harrowing, and maybe the best American sci-fi animation to date. An instant classic.
Patricia Lockwood, “When I Met the Pope,” London Review of Books [2023]
THE ODD MAN OUT IN THIS LIST, but the LRB was the single biggest influence on Blood Knife early on, albeit in a roundabout, mirror-universe, dark-other sort of way. Lockwood is one of the best essayists working right now, and this is a funny, charming, surprisingly weird anecdote about meeting the pope and hoping his tummy feels better. The purest soul of any magazine is to be itself as hard as it possibly can, and the LRB never disappoints in that respect.
***
The batteries are running low and there’s a sharp snap of old copper wiring in the air. That’s all for now.
Stay sharp.
- Kurt
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