Hivemind Times Issue #89

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Happy Friday to the most dangerous people on the internet. This is your loyal writer and co-host Graydon. 

It has been a glorious week over here at HQ. Last weekend Detroit celebrated techno music with the annual Movement fest and I got to attend Monday and talk to some of the rave freaks which was dope, stay tuned for that content. Also hit ya with a random things bracket and a minor inconveniences tier list. 

We dropped a mini merch drop with Copes which included one of my fav Riley designs ever on the Hivemind Games pieces - please go grab some while you can. 

Hope you enjoy issue number 89 of The Times and have a safe and glorious weekend, worms. 

- Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Just that singer-songwriter hitch-hiker working at the fair eating cigarettes type energy you’ve been searching for.

- Graydon

MOVIE REVIEW

Suffering for Celluloid 2

A Brief Primer on the Zag (And Obsession)

If you find yourself perusing texts on film criticism, theory, or discourse you’ll notice a certain confluence of opinions; directors seen as unassailable, careers so lauded they seem to behold braggart cherubs and god rays. This consensus is critical for the health of movies, broadly speaking - if a mass of trusted voices point you towards Obsession (2026) or Project Hail Mary (2026) you’ve got a better chance at seeing a good movie, and the movie has a better chance of turning a profit. That being said, I’m more so a fan of the polemics of a contrarian critic.

The “Zag,” (of zigzag) as I’m referring to it, represents a historical tradition of criticism - as cultural critic Mark Greif would put it, being “against everything.” This usually means cultivating a baseline of interrogative tactics - 

Is this film truthful? Is it lost in the language of advertising? Is it formally impressive or overbearing? What does the style contribute? Is it onanistic drivel? Is it derivative?

- then, using these tactics, unfurling the text of the film until you feel your perspective is represented. Counterintuitively, some of the best criticism is almost autonomic - gut, knee-jerk, center-of-self emotional reactions.

In Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag does the unthinkable task of arguing against “content,” which she sees as a flattening of art into a vessel that holds something: a true interpretive core, metaphor, a distillation of themes or actions. “…it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is…,” “What X is trying to say is…,” “What X said is…” etc., etc.)” Sontag draws attention to “…essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it… Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (Sontag).

Despite being one of the best read, densest intellectuals of her time, she saw explicit value in the translation of transparency to the written word; this is all to say that criticism need not be so quantitative or “substantive,” and that there may be a phoniness or miscalculation in the practice of seeking “substance.”

Pauline Kael, Cinema Du Cahiers, and Manny Farber are all remembered for their remarkable contrarian attitude - Kael refused to see a film more than once, the Cahiers critics founded the French New Wave on auteur theory, Farber was off the shits. So if, in the future, I get in this bitch and say “Fuck Enter the Void fuck Sixteen Candles fuck Aliens fuck Longlegs fuck The Holdovers fuck Wicked fuck The Revenant etc…” - just know I come as an unimportant rhizomatic sprig in a beautiful tree of contrarian criticism of days past.

We read to expand the way we think, to allow us miraculous access to the telepathy of language; so let’s use every last bit of that telepathy we can.

That being said, Obsession was good! To me not the 5 star future horror classic some are toting it as, but a compelling freakshow rollercoaster that reaches for a social fear somewhere between Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse and Friedkin’s The Exorcist in its anti-agentic, slow-burn fear. Debut director Curry Barker’s patience and discipline shine brightest in his allergy to quick cuts and aesthetic flourish: he found a simple fear and played it out.

If Obsession hooked you and you’re interested in relational/social horror, here are some (admittedly basic) recs:

• Possession (1981, Andrzej Żuławski)

• Audition (1999, Takashi Miike)

• Don’t Look Now (1973, Nicholas Roeg)

• Jacob’s Ladder (1990, Adrian Lyne)

• Crimes of the Future (2022, David Cronenberg)

• The Face of Another (1966, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

• Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

• Presence (2024, Steven Soderberg)

• Green Room (2015, Jeremy Saulnier)

May your monkey paw never curl.

Luv,

- Rosette Ramdin

THE MOVIE EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT

POEM OF THE WEEK

David Omer Bearden (1940-2008)

Blood Meridian Or,
The Evening Redness in the West A Ballad

Farewell my portrait of the Prima Vera,
goodbye my smoky star,
adios indelible picture
so long my heart's desire.

For the mirror empties into morning,
and the clouds leak glittering snow,
and the dark bright light torments me,
as the sun is sinking low.

Yes the sky tortures me sweetly
as the cows are walking home,
and the swallows are returning,
and arrives the fiery gloam.

No woman can release me
so my shiny craft can leave,
and the gnarled moon ignores me
as they're bringing in the sheaves.

O leafy path through the Prima Vera
beneath a high green star,
be quenched in oblivious music,
so long my lute and lyre.

NEW MERCH ALERT!!!