We fretted over it. “Do we wanna do apocalypse?” “Is this a direction folks are willing to ride?” “Are we tempting ferrets made of razor blades for November?” Then we realized that razor ferrets or no, the human spirit does not turn away. At least not for too long.
Covid. The United States government. More seasons of The Bachelor. Murder hornets, black holes eating the cosmos, and guys wearing strap-on munitions peens to Costco just in case the race war hits while they’re getting a tub o’ cheese. Things are not okay.
But there will always be art.
There’s always somebody out there saying ‘I made a thing despite the darkness, despite the fears, and straight-up in the faces of those who try to drag everyone else down.’
There will always be somebody speaking truth to power; always be a story, a picture, or a song meant to comfort, restore, or transform.
Yes, 2020 has been an rapid-fire cavalcade of body hits and soul slices. It’s also been the year we said ENOUGH, the year we TOPPLED ugliness from the past, and the year we all, in ways big and small, got our Idris Elba/Stacker Pentecost on and howled back at the abyss, “TODAY…WE ARE CANCELING THE APOCALYPSE!”
Enjoy the selections our team has picked from the ruins of humanity for you. Know that there are others out there in the wilderness searching for you. You’re never alone. There’s not an apocalypse in existence that can change that. We’re still standing.
If nothing else, the memes have been on point. (Oh…and vote. We shouldn’t have to tell you why by now.)
Team Narazu
All Indie. All Awesome.
Film: LANDSCAPES
by Leo Faierman
A tumultuous dive into cinema’s apocalyptic imagination. Some creators can’t help but reach for the end of the story, or the story that ends all stories, and film-goers readily tuck into their dramatized frenzies. Maybe we find in that darkness the frailty of our social structures, or recognize the symmetry of our environment’s eventual wrath, the strange alleviation that comes from seeing cause and effect in action. This month we’re looking at a few different projects with poignant perspectives on our final days, as well as a rarely mentioned classic (at least here in the USA) whose distressing shadow looms ever larger lately. Which is all to say: register and vote.
CRUMBS
Who is Miguel Llansó? His cinematic career feels like one of those traveling montages following a red line across the globe, beginning in Spain and landing in his second home of Ethiopia. I first became aware of Crumbs in its occasional mentions back in 2015’s indie releases, especially the striking images of its star Daniel Tadesse as Birdy, a bearded Ethiopian actor with a penetrating stare. Birdy and Candy (Selam Tesfaye) are lovers in the remnants of civilization’s past in this earthy yet dreamlike sci-fi film, entirely shot and placed in Dallol long after an apocalypse. Tadesse’s character seeks answers from the floating spaceship in the sky, heading off on a rambling journey peppered with the artifacts of humanity’s pop culture past. Crumbs is alternately unpredictably comedic, methodically measured, and gorgeously resplendent with Ethiopian vistas, offering generously intimate performances by its cast and painting a wholly unique world, one beholden to the echoes of pop ephemera with almost religious fanaticism. It’s an occasionally erratic but highly recommended experience to behold, and Crumbs is readily available on Amazon Prime.
BLOOD QUANTUM
I’ve been scanning for Jeff Barnaby’s star to rise, the Mi’kmaq director whose original spin on the zombie genre should be required watching for this month’s Indigenous People’s/F**k Columbus Day. Born in Quebec and emphatically making films that center on First Nations folks (and the Mi’kmaq in specific), Blood Quantum is a bit of a split project: half dread-before-the-storm, half zombie-action-film. It’s the kind of flick I’ve been recommending constantly after discovering it one night, despite the fact that it suffers from some considerable pacing flaws, imprecise performances, and the wavering energy of a film that feels more like two separate stories than one. Maybe part of my insistent nudging relates to its outrageously strong concept, wherein a zombie infection spreads to all but indigenous populations, whose genetic predisposition now craft spaces of hope. It’s an inspired idea that plays out in a fairly predictable plot, but Blood Quantum has blood and guts to spare, and an absolute badass of a grandfather autographing the moody finale. I’d say that Barnaby’s previous coming-of-age/contemporary-Canadian-history drama Rhymes for Young Ghouls is the superior movie overall, but Blood Quantum is required viewing for zombie fans all the same. Catch it on Shudder this month.
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
So then, we have an apocalyptic journey film and a zombie action drama relating the strains of a rebuilt society. What’s left are the invisible stories, the ones who pass on in darkness, only vaguely aware of the ominous destruction, the story of When the Wind Blows. Meet Jim and Hilda Bloggs, an elderly British couple in 1980s Sussex, fretting over tea and the tinny radio reports on developing events of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Jim busies himself on government advice for nuclear event preparation, carrying out most of it to a tee, though it’s obviously all for naught. When the Wind Blows is a disturbingly familiar-feeling story of an old couple dying in ignorant, heartbreaking darkness. It’s distinguished by an impressive soundtrack by Roger Waters, as well as a title track courtesy of David Bowie, and most in the UK seem familiar with it. Here in the states, though, the film is unusually under-seen, and the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs from which it was adapted seems equally ignored, despite how carefully relevant it feels today. Partially due to the threat of war, but more in the story’s distressing simplicity, the deaths quiet at the fringes of most post-apocalyptic stories, with two apparently well-meaning victims of a conflict that neither communicates with or regards them whatsoever. Safety dies in silence, distant from the cold war decisions that gamely slide them along abacus rungs, but it’s no less crushing to see them deteriorate. You can find When the Wind Blows cheap on Amazon Prime; check it out alongside loved ones as we all look for the light.
Comics: AFTERSHOCKS
By George Carmona, III
Why did I pick now to finally read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower? It’s a near-future world where people survive on a razor’s edge, creating small communities that just barely pull them back from falling off that edge–a world that, if we’re not careful, could be our reality. This month’s picks are also near-future warnings of what can happen when we let societies embrace fear and hate, leading into a descent toward the dark.
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, Vol. 1: Destiny
Writers: Scott Snyder and Charles Soule
Layouts: Giuseppe Camuncoli
Finishes: Daniele Orlandini (#1-4) and Leonardo Marcello Grassi (#4-6)
Colorist: Matt D. Wilson / Letterist: Crank!
Cover Art: Giuseppe Camuncoli
In the near future, the United States will pull all of its troops home, close its borders to the world, and erect a defensive barrier that keeps everyone else out. There’s also an electromagnetic shield that blocks any type of transmissions, in or out, creating a true information blackout of what is happening inside of the wall and outside in the world. While America hides behind its iron curtain, the rest of the world has moved on, reforming into new geopolitical powers, and is suffering from a deadly plague, the Sky virus, which threatens to wipe out all life in a matter of months. Suddenly, after 30 years of silence, the world’s superpowers receive a communication originating from inside the US. The message claims that the US has a cure for the Sky virus. When the outside powers put together a last-ditch Hail Mary team of people to go get the cure, what they find is a land of monsters and corrupted Americana. If you’re a fan of shows like Lost with flashbacks, time paradoxes, intricate plots, and mysterious agendas, or Dune with its mix of sci-fi and political intrigue, grab the first volume of this disturbing funhouse look into the future.
Writer/Artist: Ho Che Anderson
Writers: Steve Aoki, Tom Bilyeu, Dana Brawer, Matt Colon, Jim Krueger, and Samantha Levenshus
Pencilers: Neil Edwards, Jheremy Raapack
Inker: Keith Champagne / Colorist: Abraham Lee
Letterist: Clem Robins / Cover Art: Jheremy Raapack
Another near-future world where technology has caused a global recession due to massive unemployment, the US has decided to fix the problem by enacting Article 10, aka the Return. This new law would abolish the technology that keeps humans from working, but in doing this creates a digital and technological gulf between the working class and the elite (who still take advantage of having augments). Sound familiar? Enter Kita Sovee and the Neon Future resistance movement, their goal to bridge that gap and creating a world where humans live in a future of technological harmony. Part of this plan involves Clay Campbell, a murdered TV personality who is brought back to life with forbidden tech that makes him a pariah to the world he knew, full of powers no one expected.
Books: WHERE ARE WE NOW?
1984 has come and gone. We now live within the Parable of the Sower. Not the biblical tale, although certainly strains of it are felt, but the masterwork by Octavia Butler that–nearly30 years ago–laid out our current national nightmare so precisely as to even include the catchphrase “Make America Great Again”. Where are we now? We’re in a time of reckoning. Not a “we’re all in this together” reckoning, because that’s a phrase concocted by someone standing in a canoe after firing buckshot at its bottom. Those of us with sense have had life jackets on from the get-go. The reckoning boils down to privilege on one hand, humanity on the other: which is it to be? Octavia tried to tell us. Orwell tried too. There have been thousands of voices shouting directions at us.
Yet here we are.
GPS signal failing.
Where are we now?
EMERGENT STRATEGY
It’s not enough to say “We’re in an apocalypse” and leave folks standing there amid the debris of failed systems. Without hope and its engines of solutions, we might as well call apocalypse hell.
Things ain’t quite that final.
adrienne maree brown’s brilliant book of clear, practical strategems—inspired by Octavia Butler’s spirit calling outward from the Parables trilogy—is the self-care we need to navigate, then eliminate, apocalyptic roads. As its title implies, everything is a matter of birth. Emergence. There are no static systems. We’re never stuck. Whether macro or micro, personal, familial, communal, national…there are things that can be done!
And that, my friends, is the only message worth cementing in mind during any period of doom-and-gloom. This book will quiet the storms of lies and violence fed to us 24/7 so that we can actually think about where we are, what we’re doing, and strategies to make things better.
Sometimes all it takes is a single click to start. Head HERE to emerge.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A DEMON HAS BECOME YOUR FRIEND
The sneaky thing about apocalypse is that it can creep up on you, slow, rustling the underbrush no more than a good wind, red eyes locked onto your unsuspecting ankles and every fiber of its being ready to bite. But if you happen to see it coming, it stops and smiles.
Apocalypse will pretend to be your friend.
Bram Stoker Award-winning poet and author Linda Addison knows the signs. In this slender book of poetry and prose, she’ll not only show you how to avoid becoming comfortable with disaster, but why you should avoid it in the first place, no matter how fulfilling outrage might feel, no matter whether the apocalypse is soft or hard. The smaller apocalypses of the soul matter more than we credit. The demons in our lives must be told “This far, no further!” We must spot them in the undergrowth; become adept at tracking their unseen movement; recognize the signs of personal agency being whittled away.
If that seems like a tall job for poetry, you haven’t been around nearly enough poems.
THE WOLF QUEEN: The Hope of Aferi
We don’t often think about how often our fantasies become self-made apocalypses. We can lie to ourselves and say we’re strong individuals, islands unto ourselves…until the first flood tide, when we suddenly call out for boats. We can live stunted and fearful while boasting of our invincibility, leaving us withered and laughable. We might lose sight of hope, feelings of inter-connectivity, even question whether we’re worthy of love or respect. All of these personal erosions lead to pocket-sized apocalypses that we carry everywhere we go.
The Wolf Queen: The Hope of Aferi is about rediscovering the powerful sense of hope, first in ourselves, then toward others, that frees us to be truly strong, dependent on each other in the best ways, and able to live in peace, which is the absence of fear. From The Lord of the Rings, to the Narnia Chronicles, fantasy has always told us that apocalypse lives in our hearts before it ravages our lands. Cerece Rennie Murphy shows this with crystal clarity in her Queen series (Hope of Aferi is the 2nd of 2).
Sometimes to walk a rocky path you need a little magic lighting the way and a sure hand to help you untie any knots that bind you to anything less than your true potential.
AFRO PUFFS ARE THE ANTENNAE OF THE UNIVERSE
It’s not an apocalypse until we stop trying to change things. This book isn’t out yet. Presales start late October 2020, on-sale December 1st. This book is Stacker Pentecost from Pacific Rim canceling the apocalypse. It’s every mother who’ll be damned if she lets her children be fodder for someone else’s foolishness. It’s a hopeful book for the hopeful, a book of possibilities for the observant, and a strong GPS signal away from certain doom. You can sign up for updates about it at Obsidian Sky.
In the meantime stay focused, keep an eye on your self-care, and keep an eye out for all of us in this caravan moving toward better days, rather than fire and ruin.
Fire and ruin is a loser’s game. The AFRO PUFFS crew came to win.