#it’s so funny how I read Babel first and now I see it everywhere in the poly war trilogy

[wackachewbacca]

Why is it with all the books I’ve read by R. F. Kuang it always comes down to entitled white Eurocentric powers trying to invade, colonize and get the very real or fictional state of China addicted to opium? And she’s so real for it honestly cause the real enemy all along is just an arrogant white man

[astrallines]

The Crumbling Tower of 2020

Notes on the Triple Conjunction

Hello friends. What follows is a short introduction to the incredibly rare and historical astrological conditions of the year 2020. This was written with the intention of accessibility first and foremost; I believe it’s important that people have some idea of this moment in a historical context, and the tools to evaluate the themes and stories that are emerging currently and in the near future. To my eyes astrology is at its most useful when it is neither prescriptive nor prophetic. It is foremost a tool of psychological midwifery; reading the meaning of the world and its events.

So it’s in my interest to be painting in broad strokes. If you want concrete predictions or exact dates for orbs of conjunction now and in history, then there is a vast field of mundane astrology for you to Google. The myths I’m unfolding here are only for context and consideration—I hope you find them helpful.

Also, there will be a major western bias in my evaluation of history, which sucks, but that’s the milieu I grew up in and can speak to, and it remains the information most easily available. But of course astrological conditions are affecting the entire world. We can still trace the vibe through western examples.

Our Axial Moment There are two incredibly rare astrological events happening this year. One event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius. These two planets come together routinely, mechanically, every 20 years. But the rhythm of their waltz is such that each meeting takes place in signs of the same element for 200 years at a time. So when they conjoin in Aquarius, in the last weeks of 2020, that will be their first time together in an air sign since the 14th century.

Since 1802, all of their conjunctions have been in earth signs. (Much more on the significance of this later, but some may already notice this 200 period’s coincidence with the industrial revolution and the age of capital). In the 200-odd years before 1802, they would join every time in fire signs—and for the 200 years before that, water. One waltz more brings us back to the 1300s and 1200s, the previous epoch of air signs. Returning to the present day, we should realize that since an age like this persists for two centuries at a time, it is essentially impossible for someone who witnesses such a transition, to have ever even known anyone who witnessed the previous transition. That is, the 100 year old person in December 2020—even if they had, as a newborn, shared a breath with a 100 year old person—would not reach far back enough in history to have even a dim, second-hand knowledge of the epoch of fire (1603-1801). These periods are effectively the frame edges; the curtains around the drama of the world stage.

Rare as it is, the other historical aspect of the year is much rarer: the fact that Saturn and Jupiter will also conjoin Pluto in Capricorn before they dance their first step together in Aquarius. Though these 3 will never occupy the exact same degree together, they will come very close, on and off throughout 2020. Of course a triple conjunction of planets will always occur in more unpredictable intervals than any pair of planets because of the 3 separate orbits. Famously—well, famous among astrologers—it last happened in the sign of Capricorn during the founding year of the city of Babylon, 1894 BCE.

History of the Elemental Epochs Because the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle is so regular, and because we didn’t know about outer planets til the 18th century, the dance of these two planets through the elemental stations is by far the oldest astrological tool for determining epochal periods. It has long been assumed to be the basic attitudinal/affective backdrop of the zeitgeist. (Now that we know about Pluto, we have a new vibecheck every 12 years! But isn’t it funny that generations didn’t have names until we noticed Pluto in 1930?)

I would be remiss not to mention that there are overlaps between these periods. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn were briefly conjunct in an air sign (Libra) for a few months in 1981. So toward the end of each epoch, humanity gets a little multi-month preview of the coming age. 1981 and the transitional period is a whole other topic in itself, but that’s all I’ll say here.

Even though these elemental ages have been observed for so long, we don’t have a ton of historical examples to draw upon to get a sense of the nature of a particular epoch. As for the air age that we’re entering into, we can refer to the high medieval period as the last instantiation, but to get a third example we have to go into history 6 centuries before that! Soon the world starts to look so different from the current day, that we have to stretch the imagination that much farther. So let’s just a get a brief summary of the previous cycle through the elements.

Earth 1802-2020

This is the epoch we are still in as I write this. It began during the industrial revolution, and the earth themes are undeniable. Human begins have had a resolutely atomic understanding of the universe; materialism is rampant; and it feels that capital and capitalism are catalysts of most human drama. We take things literally and concretely: instead of speculating about other realms, we want to drive our spaceships to big slabs of land like the moon and Mars. We have discovered how to build and make so much STUFF!

Fire 1603-1801

This period is famous for the enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. The time of great sparks! Reason, brilliance, luminance ... self-validation and self-determination. This is really when human beings began to appreciate the value of the idiosyncrasy of a particular thinker. “THIS dude’s contribution” etc. Rights, laws, freedom, were all in vogue. “Here I am!” say the fire signs.

Water 1425-1602

Just as materialist scientism was born out of the liberating thought of the enlightenment, so were the insights of the enlightenment enabled by the world-broadening discoveries of the renaissance. During the water epoch, everyone was sailing everywhere, being introduced to new cultures, and the “new world” was reached by the Europeans. At home, classics of antiquity were being rediscovered and the world was broadened in that sense. Shakespeare was poppin off in a big way. The concept of the stage is essentially water; water is the idea that there is an affective component to reality at all.

Air 1226-1424

Is it a coincidence that the least widely known stage of the cycle is the one we are now entering? Or is that just the nature of history, as it fades further into the past? This period was called, in the West, the “high medieval” era. It was marked by civic demarcations that more or less persist to this day—the previous few hundred years saw constantly changing borders, but now people grouped more firmly into ethnic or national identities drawn to territories. This is also where we got chivalry and the first real rights for women in a long time. And there was the discovery of an actual social life and leisure. “Hanging out” was invented, thank God.

Reality itself received a major patch update: we invented mechanical clocks, which caused people to relate to the passage of time in a totally new way. We used to just slice up the sunrise-to-sundown period into 12 equal parts; now hours were a constant length throughout the year. Common folk had glass windows in their homes for the first time, and the elite even wore glass in front of their eyes to correct their vision. Music became much more complex, as people had more time to take it seriously and form theories. People could go to libraries; for the first time ever there were more books in cities than in monasteries. Cities were finally the place to be. We invented the compass, the game of chess, and the printing press. The astrolabe, like the compass, allowed us to orient ourselves to something that was formerly hopelessly abstract (the stars). Most of this cool shit came from the Arab world, which was flourishing.

Air Epoch 2.0 That’s the historical overview. Obviously there is much, much more there for any anthropologist or history of philosophy ass person. But we are beginning to see some idea of the relation between the qualities symbolized by the elements and the respective periods. Now we can begin a more informed speculation.

The movement from the previous earth age to the previous air age seems to be one of dramatically more complex social relations. Less emphasis on the riches of a kingdom, and more emphasis on its culture, civility, and sophistication. Abstract things became the treasures. As we look to our own incoming air epoch, it is easy to envision a world that places more emphasis on networks instead of objects. Social media, gig economy, and blockchain all appear to be prefigurations of this. In terms of philosophy, it no longer seems very radical to conceptualize oneself as part of a universe whose essential composition is not defined by particles (nouns) but relations and processes (verbs).

What Was Babylon? I ain’t no student of ancient culture. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even know Babylon was where Iraq is. Of course I think it would behoove all of us to research as much as possible the previous instantiation of this astrological aspect, but I also think it’s valid to speak about its cultural impact through a layman’s osmosis.  As far as I can tell: what is Babylon best remembered for? The miraculous hanging gardens, the Tower of Babel, and the law code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s code, inscribed onto a stele about a century after the founding of Babylon is celebrated as the first known written laws, some 190 edicts long—and by the estimation of modern scholars, supremely humanitarian for its time. What is the modern equivalent of the ancient innovation of codified laws? Hard to fathom, but something for us to consider as the new age dawns.

More famously, there is the story of the Tower of Babel. A persistent image of human hubris, even today people respond to the tower motif as a symbol of defiance of God or of nature, and it is routinely invoked when artists and pundits comment on the ecological folly of industrial enterprise. Human beings tried to use their intellectual capacities to reach the position of God. Without reading the Bible, I can tell you that the punishment for this was the diversification of languages. All of a sudden people couldn’t speak to each other, because there were so many ways to speak.

Today we take for granted the many languages of human beings, so what is the modern equivalent of this event? Taken as a metaphor, the variation of languages could represent a variation of worldview. Styles of interfacing with reality. Because the element of air is so closely associated with concepts like perception, the structuring of thought, communication, and virtual realities, we might imagine that in the new age we will begin to understand just how deeply diversified our mechanisms of interpreting reality are. Phenomenology seems like a pretty fringe field in our current world, but AI is certainly not; and content creators have increasingly brought phenomenological themes to the center of their work over the last couple decades. Just as the previous air epoch (12/1300s) saw the advent of movable type, perhaps we will soon develop novel means of recording our impressionistic realities.

Finally, Babylon was host to the famous hanging gardens. Supposedly built by king Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife who missed the natural beauty of Iran, it is still unclear whether this wonder of the world ever existed in physical reality. In any case, the story is relevant: a ruler, in the midst of tremendous infrastructural expansion, and with it the inevitable subjugation of nature, finds that his greatest cultural influence across the centuries is ecological restoration. Looking at these three legacies of Babylon together is rather interesting: the law code stele, though purportedly divine in origin, is unquestionably real to our materialist sensibilities—you can go and see it. The Tower of Babel, taken from the Bible, was probably not real in the same fundamental way; though there was without question a great ziggurat in Babylon, the Biblical account is not literal. The hanging gardens is the most mythological. So between the three we have different concentrations of myth and historical fact.

Second Second Life I write this in the first few weeks of social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. There is much more to be said about the connection between this unprecedented social condition and the imminent radical astrology—maybe the subject of some other essay. But off the dome, we can see plainly the defaulting of Capricornian things: governments, businesses, economies, and social infrastructure. Without much of a choice, we are withdrawing our energy from the material to which we are accustomed. We’re cooped up in our houses, where the merciful currents of the internet continue to draw us on, to operate in cyberspace as normal. New social functions and vocabularies are already emerging as we are forced to reconsider the online networks that have seemed so toxic for the last few years. People find themselves operating “peer to peer” out of necessity. Some “inessential” products may no longer be available on amazon, but your neighbor might have them. More importantly, people are reaching out to each other for nothing more than human contact. We’ve been wringing our hands about the importance of human connection, but capitalism—through spectacle or stranglehold—has drawn us away from putting it first.

Social service is (along with certain essential aspects of the internet) ruled by Aquarius. Saturn, governor of concern, has already ingressed into this sign, but will retrograde back out in a few months; and then at the end of the year, it will be joined by Jupiter, who greases the wheels, expands the potentiation of Saturn’s concern, and affords prosperity to those who take social service seriously. And together they will inaugurate the new age.

[northenn]

My 100 yens about the album...

I’ll be brief. The worst album ever made. By humankind.

It’s so bad that if I were about to die and had some blood to waste, I’d probably use it to write this album name on the cold, hard ground. It’s so bad that my cat was in the same room while I was listening to the whole shit and she abandoned me on the side of a trafficked highway. It’s so bad that Death came at my door and when I asked her how bad I was she was like “nah man, you know, you’re kinda in a bad position but not as bad as this album”.

When they told me they were going to ask random artists the write them shit  they didn’t tell me said artists had already this shit written and that they used it to wipe their asses. Is this some kind of poetic revenge? For having forced so many good souls to play with Nishi on Sunday afternoons? Is this a dream? Is this a reality? Did I slip over the blood coming from my ears and died? Is that Subaru over my dead body? Is that Subaru that tiny, sad old man running in the distance with a bras in hand? Hold on, where’s my bras? Is that my bras? SUBARU YOU LIL PIECE OF SHIT COME BACK WITH M-

02. IMA That. Motherfucking. CRESCENDO. Them nanaNANANAAAANAAANAAAAA. I can’t. They did put it basically everywhere. Even the damn line before the chorus (that is the crescendo) basically grows on a crescendo. Subaru sings in crescendo. The violins go in crescendo. You know what else is in crescendo in this song? My balls. You have managed to get my balls in crescendo and I’m not even a man. You had Yoko Kanno for this one and you managed to lose her like that. It’s almost like having the chance to bring back Dax Johnson from hell and being like “Yo Dax, man! Since you’re gimme some of them Daft Punk vibes, will ya? Love you man, you the man!” Like. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS EVEN WRONG WITH YOU YOU PIECES OF PIGS SCRA-

03. DO NA I For some reasons I dance the chorus of this one as Aserejé. Don’t ask, don’t know. It’s a good song after all. Kinda summerish, kinda happy, doesn’t pretend to be too much if not a song with two lines counted and a Gorilla that had a perfect chance to rap with the others during Egetsunai (hold on asshole, it’s not your moment yet) but probably during the recordings was like “I don’t mix with the plebs” and went out of the studios like a diva, flipping his fur coat all over his shoulders even tho it was mid August. It had me dancing like a polar bear shoot in the shoulder, which is always a good sign when it comes to the songs I like, so it’s okay. I guess.

05. YUME HE NO KAERIMICHI Okay, listen to this. Now go and listen to Aladdin’s A Whole New World. And don’t tell it’s not the same basic hook ‘cause I’m going to hire a llama to spit you in the face. I know the right people, I have the possibilities to do this. They needed an encore song. They needed it so badly that probably the writing of the song went on like: “We need LALALAS for people to sing over them while branding our new balls shaped concert torches”. “So you want a song with some LALALAS?”. “No, we ain’t need a song. We need LALALAS”. “LALALAS?” “LALALAS motherfucker.” They’re going to put this in the encore. We’re going to be forced to sing sixty-two hours of LALALAS while Subaru gropes everything on stage, Nishi watches him in awe from behind the curtains and the Gorilla thanks even his mother for having porked her husband 40 years ago and so having given him the chance to perform that day. Watch them. Get your balls torches ready and watch them.

06. EGETSUNAI I kinda want to hate on this one but at the same time I can’t ‘cause I know this is going to be FIRE during the lives. Ohkura asking Yasu if he needs some phone books to stand on to be seen. Subaru wondering if Yoko has fried his last brain cell left while doing the sauna. Yoko reminding us that Subaru drops his videogames in the toilet and then spends the evenings crying about it. Like. They’ve improved the dragging game so much that I feel that I, as a common mortal, all I can do is stare at them awe and praying for their benevolence. At least five of them are going to stab each other in the eyes during this performance before the end of this tour, god bless their hearts, this song has taught me so much.

08. NEVER SAY NEVER Imagine. You’re in theatre, watching with pounding heart uncle Ben getting shot for the sixth time in the span of seven years while all the hands of the uncles in the sala misteriously disappear between their legs, right where balls are supposed to be, and a general grasp grasp starts to be heard in the dark of the theatre. Uncle Ben dies in the middle of a busy street. And then, during a funeral full of black umbrellas, rain and people watching the ceremony from under a tree 4 chilometres away, the opening of Hamtaro starts playing. Now. Dwarf, with all due respect. NOW. I’m not saying the song is bad, what I’m saying is that all I’m hearing is “hey hey bon bon” and so will probably all the people attending to uncle Ben’s funeral. I’m not saying this is bad, but Elektra get an Amy Lee singing for her while all Spidey is going to get is you and other six crippled old men singing “dance dance”. Just. Just think ‘bout it, ‘kay? Friends as before, we’re chill.

10. S.E.V.E.N KOROBI E.I.G.H.T OKI “S.E.V.E.N KOROBI E.I.G.H.T OKI” *this going on for some time*

12. SEISHUN NO SUBETE Yume V 2.0 but this time we decided to cut Ohkura’s atrocious tower of babel off to give him that white, angelic voice that every boy under the age of eight has but that we don’t have enough money to hire so he can sing that one line. Also. You get a season, and you get a season, and you get a seaso- 13. ANSWER Q: Is George Michael really dead? A. No. I honestly have no idea what’s bothering me more in this song: if the Broadway Cool Gang Entering In The Scene Snapping Fingers, if the people happily clapping their hands while Yoko is singing in a futile attempt to cover his voice, if George Michael appearing in my room as the ghost of the past, the present and the future everytime the chorus starts or if them throwing up sounds towards the end of the song. Debate is opened.

14. NOSTALGIA AHAHAHAHAH. FUCK. YOU.

The regular edition is not around yet, so I still have no idea what Jam Lady and Ikiro are going to be. I’ve heard that for Ikiro members were requested to write their own scores, so I’m kinda curious for this one. Never mind, good souls exist and they’ve helped me to find Subaru’s long lost daughter. So, for the members song I have:

1.1. TRAFFIC If you’ve read the entire shit or even the first paragraph then you probably have a pretty clear idea of my opinion regarding this album. I did only pre-ordered one limited (the B) as soon as YesAsia released the album infos and that was it. By the end on the week I’m probably going to get myself the Regular, cause that’s how much this song is good. TRAFFIC is hands down one of their best band songs. It has balance, it has balls and guts and in certain ways it has managed to change their game when it comes to band songs. The classic guitar opens the song and is chaotic and never going to be heard again. The bass plays the boss role and appears predominatly during the verses. It’s loud and tight and it has the drums following closely, step by step. The trumpet appears only in the pre-chorus and speeds up the tempo. Then, all the instruments have this match midway song. Even the way the members split the verses has changed: Yasu challenged the beginning, Ryo forgotten his central role during the chorus and went second, Subaru and Ohkura somehow ended up together, speeding up together during the pre-chorus, Maru is first heard during the last bit of the song and funny enough the only instruments following him are the drums, keeping this strange balance of bass and drums, bassist and drummer. It’s refreshing. I guess there’re no other words to describe it: a refreshing, intense band song that dares to challenge the usual positions of the members.

1.2 IKIRO Subaru’s songs always have this weird “you can do it!” feeling. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s almost like you’re watching a romantic comedy and there’s this guy that realizes last minute how much he loves the girl that now is leaving the country and so he runs to the airport. Subaru’s songs are basically how I see the dude’s brain working as soon as he realizes he might still have a chance, if he manages to make it in time. Ikiro is not any different, with the only exception that before writing his guitar score the Dwarf went on Hendrix’s grave and spit on it in a challenging way. Ikiro is good song after all even tho it has some of this “already heard” feeling, some bits of LIFE, some others coming from their ballads I can’t really put my finger on. But you can still pick that hopeful, weird Subaru-ish sound and that’s the reason why I promote Ikiro after all.

So, in conclusion: TRAFFIC, IKIRO: GOOD ALL THE OTHER 26526 SONGS: THAT’S THE TEMPO DANTE WAS IMAGING THE DAMNED SOULS DANCING TO IN HELL