Justin Isis is a Japanese based writer, artist and key player within the Neo-Decadent movement – An international collective of artists, writers and creatives working together collaboratively and individually. Releasing works whilst also seeking to transform both themselves and their society in the process.
With Justin elaborating,
“Neo-Decadence is “Decay Accelerationism.” It is the saprophyte or decomposer eating away at the time hole ruins of the 20th century to clear the way for the future.
It is the first coherent and comprehensive artistic movement of the 21st Century, addressing ALL arts and areas of everyday life, rather than simply making facetious statements as an art world gesture or recapitulating earlier movements.
It is violent, parodistic, supremely aesthetic.
It is not “sincere” or “authentic” – these are tiresome clichés.
Neither is it a revival of the 19th century Decadent movement. It stands in opposition to Neo-Passéism, “the unexamined artistic logic of capitalist realism,” i.e. most of what is consumed on a daily basis by the patrons of corporate art and publishing.
It is truly crosscultural, not limited to a single language or nation…
At the same time, we are not trying to “add diversity” or “represent lived experience.” These are 20th century clichés that still presume a hub, a centre. But there is none. So, true, horizontal, crosscultural collaboration is the path.
What this will eventually produce is unknown, but it will be something new and distinctive, pushing past the current global stagnation of art and writing.“
In addition to his leadership role in the Movement, Justin has also written an already large body of work – which has been published through a variety of well regarded publishers such as Snuggly Books and Chômu Press.
Wanting to get to know Justin more we sent him some questions to answer over email.
Read our interview with Justin, below…
Getting Acquainted
Name + D.O.B?
Justin Isis – some time in the mid 1980s…
City, State and Country you currently call home?
Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
I am trying to work out an eventual move to China, or somewhere in Latin America. I like living in places that force me to learn new languages.
City, State and Country you’re from?
Various parts of Milan, Perth, New York, etc. I don’t object to the “third culture kid” term. So I am not really “from” anywhere – both my parents were immigrants to the area where I was raised, and I’ve lived in completely different places since.
I am a “rootless cosmopolitan” in that sense, and do not like the idea of national identity, which seems a bit of a consolation prize for people unable to formulate more interesting and individual identities.
Please describe some memories – such as relationships, adventures, study, concerts, art, writing, romance, politics, work, crime, religion… ANYTHING really – from the stages of your life noted below:
* Age 78 – prior incarnation:
The last five years of life as a senescent Mormon insurance salesman slowly dying in a retirement community have been somewhat less than amusing. It is difficult to really concentrate on anything, I require tons of medication just to maintain basic kidney and pancreatic functioning, and I am surrounded by other decaying human wrecks, presided over by staff who treat me as a tedious object to be inspected for signs of further deterioration.
Sometimes I am dimly aware of my eldest son CHARLES visiting me, making sure I have included him in my will, and occasionally making disparaging remarks to his wife Sandra. Apparently my parenting was not enough to address his emotional needs!
Fuck you Charles, I spent my entire life providing for you.
I provided your daily ham and carrots. I provided your clean, rectilinear jaw angles and indefatigable digestive system. I even provided you with a ten speed bike. Now that my organs are failing like a bad bank bailout, all you can think of is the will and how quickly you will be able to not have to worry about me anymore.
Looking back, my life was one of duty and restraint. The fog of dementia makes it difficult for me to concentrate on much beyond distant memories of my Utah boyhood, missionary trip to Ecuador, etc. There was little time for smoking crack and bulk buying frivolous leisurewear. Irritated, I decide to reincarnate as an avant-garde poet and candyflip the fuck out with cheap LSD and MDMA, do pelvic floor exercises, and otherwise make the most of the conveniences of the upcoming 21st century.
I also decide to tool Charles in my next life, as I suspect we have been playing similar hijinks on each other right back to our earliest incarnations as prokaryotic cells floating in a primordial ocean (back then of course the “boundaries issues” involved literal cell walls protecting our nascent organelles).
In the moments directly preceding death I achieve a priori awareness of the underlying cosmological structure, which I try to convey to Charles, although it comes out as “uhhh, uhh, uhhhhhhhhh…” and Charles fails to realize the nature of the Macrocosm.
I navigate the post-death realms with the proper passwords I had vouchsafed to my soul in my earlier incarnation as an extremely sarcastic Taoist magician in the Song dynasty, boggle the archons and re-enter the physical plane…
* Age 5 – beginnings:
My skin is extraordinarily clean.
I realize that briefs are an absurd, constricting inconvenience and petition my parents to purchase boxers. I vow never to pursue any career which will necessitate the wearing of briefs, neckties or button up Western-style shirts.
An early childhood bout of rhabdomancy leaves me susceptible to dowsing; I am often found doodlebugging and am encouraged by my parents to accept small fees.
I embark on an early passionate adventure with a fellow child, Yashmeen. Being only three years old, we are limited to intense hand holding, meaningless mutual exposure of our genitals, and imaginative play of a particularly absorbing and fathomless scope. We are like two cars on a rollercoaster made of childhood flesh, completing an endless circuit without ever climactically colliding. Seventeen years later she dies from drug-related renal failure.
The plight of the unfortunate fills me with sorrow. I become suspicious of neoliberal economic policies, Reaganism, cultural imperialism. My heart overflows with sugary Christlike compassion which I occasionally collect in a small paper cup.
Influenced by the idealism of Kropotkin and others, I berate my parents with anarchist philosophy. They respond by asserting the value of Tradition and justified hierarchies of merit, dismissing various socialist and anarchist schemes as unrealistic and unlikely to ever eventuate in sustained or functional outcomes.
I try to punch them but my fists are small and flabby, and their physical, economic and social capital outweighs my own.
* Age 10 – continuations:
My ability to assert my will is limited by a lack of physical gains, zero economic power and a critical shortage of allies. I attempt spiritual rejuvenation, moral agitation and the kindling of a basic political consciousness, but those in my peer group soon return to their usual diversions, sinking into the generalized ‘post-historical’ stupor of the 1990s. Their hands are full of Ninja Turtles and their minds are full of hand drawn animation of a particularly repetitive nature.
I maintain excellent posture and eat a relatively balanced diet.
One day I encounter Charles, now middle-aged, who has come to Australia on vacation. I approach him and explain that he is an immortal Perspective expressing itself through infinite combinations in the medium of time, and that in previous incarnations we fought in the Trojan war together on the side of mighty Agamemnon, founded a city in modern day Ethiopia, etc. but he doesn’t understand and is preoccupied with small changes in the value of stocks.
I often scuffle with dunderheaded Presbyterians, monotonous goths and devotees of popular punk, amongst other types of particularly inferior character and retrograde aesthetic tendencies.
Nevertheless, the bounds of civility are rarely exceeded.
I take various correspondence courses and begin internet research into particle physics. My heroes include Wernher von Braun and Leo Szilard.
My favorite film is De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and my favorite cartoon is Magical Princess Minky Momo.
* Age 15 – getting serious:
Although I have already completed several novels, I decide that most literary effort is revolting vanity committed by the inferior graduates of American universities and foisted on the rest of the world through major publishing houses: all that remains for a gentleman of some distinction is the pursuit of nuclear physics and the cultivation of a truly Olympian physique.
I begin running tren and other steroid cycles.
I long to be “on the square” and petition the local Masonic lodge for immediate sponsorship. Given that I am deemed to be “underage,” I am refused entry.
I subsequently denounce the Masons as charlatans and swear undying enmity (later I succeed in causing the ruin of most of those who blackballed me, at great personal cost and through the application of ceremonial magick and timely false accusations; particularly Frederick M. Sullivan, formerly of Leederville, Perth, WA; I concentrate on destroying his organs with methodical curses, giving him updates along the way. Eventually cirrhosis is reached after eight and a half years of intermittent but fairly focused effort; he dies excruciatingly after which I celebrate by playing Guilty Gear X2 at a local arcade; my favorite character is Jam Kuradoberi).
On a school holiday I contract syphilis after getting my hand stuck in the syphilis jar; luckily, modern quackery is able to alleviate it.
Occasionally I steal fresh produce from local farmers markets.
* Age 20 – young adult:
I am blissfully free from mental turmoil and require no interventions, exorcisms, therapies, welfare allowances or serotonin-altering pharmaceutical drugs; I do not even require advice, though I encounter no shortage of the unsolicited kind, usually dispensed by those who have inconsiderately remained alive well past their period of relevance; these latter often identify themselves as writers of “genre fiction,” which term I learn to be all but synonymous with a lack of intelligent thought, creative ambition and basic mental and emotional continence.
My concentration is occasionally enhanced by coffee and my internal organs are paragons of the democratic spirit, labouring away in harmonious accord.
The soles of my feet become callused from epic perambulation.
My nasal bridge is moderately aquiline.
My diet remains excellent although I occasionally consume too much calcium: an admittedly trivial vice.
In the restroom of a Turkish restaurant I meet a beat scientist and am briefly persuaded to drop bars, which I do with elegant carelessness, scattering them to the corners of SoundCloud. My technical skill is matchless, which puts me in danger of invidious rivalry; bored, I retire.
At times my mood becomes even more positive than usual and I often smile at strangers, resulting in no end of new friends and acquaintances. I befriend numerous local children and treat them almost as if they were my own, imparting life lessons and timely hair brushings when their curls threaten to become too unruly.
Almost by accident I marry a young Bolivian widow with beautiful ankles and a surplus of Christlike compassion (Yéssica) but am soon divorced, owing to my own frivolity and inexperience in maintaining a household with a South American.
I decide that Australians are incapable of musical achievement and angrily depart the country, vowing never again to listen to Jet, Radio Birdman, Cold Chisel, Jimmy Barnes or TISM; I abandon even Kylie Minogue, having grown disenchanted with the production values of her recent releases.
* Age 25 – adult mode:
I abandon powerlifting and nuclear physics and sink into an abyss of French toast and moderate nihilism. I return to writing and release several books which are only read by cynical Germans of the professional class.
In a bakery I encounter a short haired, boyish young woman from New Zealand (Katherine or “Kizzy”) and invite her directly to my house for the next few years; this results in at least three children for which I decide to take zero financial responsibility, as I am unable to conclusively verify paternity.
The children eventually develop curly ginger hair which I teach them to brush in the proper manner; they are eternally grateful and come to prefer me to their succession of stepfathers.
The youngest, Alonzo, is now an apprentice carpenter.
During a ritual I succeed in evoking the spirit of G.I. Gurdjieff to corporeal manifestation in the form of a shivering ectoplasm coating the surface of an obsidian mirror. To anchor the spirit I use an NES cartridge of Karnov, given the titular character’s resemblance to the Armenian-Russian mystic.
Gurdjieff reveals that the Fourth Way was a sophisticated form of “lulz” and that the Greek method of preparing cabbage is the most satisfying for the digestive system. He specifies that anal sex is preferable to vaginal “for purposes of sharpening mental clarity” and berates me for not practicing it assiduously enough. He also reveals that all apocalyptic scenarios are unfounded and that the human race will endure for at least another eighteen million years, colonizing most of the Milky Way and also Andromeda. Sophisticated methods of “light capture” technology mean that post-human entities will be able to remotely view every past event in human history.
The last revelation is the most critical. Given that all human achievements will infallibly outlast the solar system, all actions take on vast importance. All foolish mistakes will be subjected to an intense scrutiny. Those wearing UNIQLO will be mocked endlessly for their sartorial failings.
“The mockery of UNIQLO will never end,” it is explained to me. “And those who naively felt that Haruki Murakami’s remedial prose style was acceptable will endure aeons of posthumous shame.”
* Age 30 – meanderings:
I listen to dancehall reggae compulsively. Nothing else happens during this period – there is only dancehall and the excruciating consciousness of my slowly elapsing youth.
* Age 35 – fully formed:
More volumes of fiction, poetry, etc. are released.
Realizing that it will be necessary to overhaul ALL areas of art, Brendan Connell and I assert Neo-Decadence in various manifestos. Connell consumes alcohol and watches Korean dramas.
Quentin S. Crisp and I eat sloppy ripe peaches in public and become fascinated with wrinkled widow joints; we begin hanging out with personable widows in Ikebukuro Chinatown. The Cantonese widows give us medicinal herbs which preserve vitality and encourage a positive attitude towards online marketing.
One night Quentin meets a young woman from Canton, Ohio and is soon caught between “Ji-Mui from Canton, China (Guangzhou) and Sarah-Jane from Canton, Ohio”; the Canton/Canton confusion produces spiritual dissension of an irreparable nature.
I later find myself torn between a widow from Cairo, Illinois and one from Cairo, Egypt.
These “doubling” coincidences also strike numerous friends, although I am unable to work out their exact significance.
My cardiovascular health remains excellent and my dental brilliance is undimmed.
I am fortunate for my blessings and routinely burn offerings to ancestral deities and patron spirits.
Personal motto(s)?
“Stay Pleasant even in the face of unpleasantness. Remain doughty.“
The Neo-Decadent Movement
For those at home who may be unaware – please explain the Neo-Decadent movement and your involvement in it?
Neo-Decadence is “Decay Accelerationism.” It is the saprophyte or decomposer eating away at the time hole ruins of the 20th century to clear the way for the future.
It is the first coherent and comprehensive artistic movement of the 21st Century, addressing ALL arts and areas of everyday life, rather than simply making facetious statements as an art world gesture or recapitulating earlier movements.
It is violent, parodistic, supremely aesthetic.
It is not “sincere” or “authentic” – these are tiresome cliches.
Neither is it a revival of the 19th century Decadent movement. It stands in opposition to Neo-Passéism, “the unexamined artistic logic of capitalist realism,” i.e. most of what is consumed on a daily basis by the patrons of corporate art and publishing.
It is truly crosscultural, not limited to a single language or nation. There are Peruvian, Slovenian, Mexican, Iranian, Chinese and Danish Neo-Decadents. A multilingual perspective is the norm – if you can’t do translation work, we don’t really want you (provincialism is over).
At the same time, we are not trying to “add diversity” or “represent lived experience.” These are 20th century cliches that still presume a hub, a center. But there is none. So, true, horizontal, crosscultural collaboration is the path.
What this will eventually produce is unknown, but it will be something new and distinctive, pushing past the current global stagnation of art and writing.
Why and when did the Movement start?
The first manifesto was written in 2010, but more organized activity didn’t really start until around 2016, when Daniel Corrick and I began editing DROWNING IN BEAUTY: THE NEO-DECADENT ANTHOLOGY. The necessity of editorial standards forced us to clarify our aesthetic positions, which led to the writing of more manifestos and, eventually, the completion of more anthologies.
The past two years (2019-2021) have seen much more organized and collaborative activity across all involved countries, and an influx of new members.
So, why Neo-Decadence now? Because culture is stuck in a time loop. New literature, art and fashion need to come into existence, but extremely sophisticated corporate structures are in place to prevent this from happening, because rehashing previous decades is more profitable. At the same time, worldwide inequality only increases.
The situation is similar to the 1890s. This is a decadent age, a gilded age.
In a way, it’s impossible for contemporary art and writing to NOT be Neo-Decadent, provided they’re at all concerned with accuracy.
… and who are some of its key players?
Brendan Connell wrote the first manifesto in 2010, and his work is still the best place to start.
Quentin S. Crisp has been building a body of work that cycles through novels, memoirs, poetry, essays and unclassifiable fusions of them all. He is one of the most sophisticated prose stylists currently alive.
Damian Murphy is revolutionizing occult fiction, opening up previously unimagined avenues with rigorous technical skill informed by strict and disciplined praxis.
Gaurav Monga is an excellent writer. Golnoosh Nour. Kristine Ong-Muslim.
There are visual artists: Gea Philes, Ila Pop, Sailor Stephens, Callum Leckie, etc.
I am sure some of what is regularly covered on this site has some crossover with Neo-Decadence.
Really it is not even a movement so much as a series of concurrent, crosscultural movements. Brazilian Neo-Decadence is different from Scottish Neo-Decadence, which is different from Japanese Neo-Decadence.
Of late, the Brazilian faction of Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, Thassio Rodriguez Capranera and others has been very active, and I look forward to seeing more of their material.
Please list some Neo-Decadent texts that would help people get acquainted with the movement?
NEO-DECADENCE: 12 MANIFESTOS is the place to start.
DROWNING IN BEAUTY: THE NEO-DECADENT ANTHOLOGY gives a taste of the fiction.
NEO-DECADENT COOKBOOK has a mixture of short fiction, poetry and essays.
NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION is the next step fiction anthology released soon.
Get that when it comes out.
Also:
Brendan Connell – METROPHILIAS
Quentin S. Crisp – BLUE ON BLUE
Damian Murphy – THE ACEPHALIC IMPERIAL
Gaurav Monga – RUINS
Kristine Ong-Muslim – WE BURY THE LANDSCAPE
Writing and Art Questions
When and why did you first become interested in everything creative?
… and any pivotal creative moment(s) / influence(s)?
As a child I had a fairly constant and automatic stream of narratives in my head, which I considered much more interesting than most of what was going on around me. I began transcribing these almost as soon as I could write, which means there was never much question of doing anything else.
Visual art was equally important to me at the time, and my initial ambition was to create comics and graphic novels.
Much of the material I completed as a young teenager was in line with the popular material of the time. Really I could have gone on to become a successful genre writer or some other cog in the Neo-Passéist content production machine, if not for chronic and extreme boredom which rendered me unable to complete the kinds of long-form plot structures and executions these productions require. So that avenue was exhausted and closed before I turned 20.
Everything since has been a consequence of finding and exploring the avenues that remain interesting.
I want to make clear that I never had any intention to be any kind of “transgressive” writer, and that I consider this an absolutely puerile ambition, almost exclusively pursued by mediocre types who wouldn’t be capable of genuinely threatening a damp sock. “Transgression” only ever ends up reinforcing the premises it pits itself against.
I see everything I attempt as a mainstream approach, or at least my interpretation of it.
(Some art by Justin.)
Please describe your usual writing process – from initial idea, to creation and eventual completion?
I do my best to delay and avoid writing whenever possible. This, I’ve found, is for the best: I rarely begin writing an idea until years after I’ve initially had it. I don’t want to be “excited” about anything I’m writing, as superficial excitement is usually the sign of a fairly trivial idea.
The ideas genuinely worth executing have to be cold, persistent, merciless, i.e. they have to assemble themselves in my mind with minimal conscious effort, and they have to be somewhat obsessive, i.e. I won’t forget about them until they’ve been completed.
I am a “top down” writer, in that I begin from concepts and do my best not to repeat anything. I don’t “revise” in the sense that I think most people take this term to mean. There is only ever one draft, with most of the work done in my head over a period of years. Then it is just a matter of working through it all.
I don’t move on unless every paragraph is exactly as I want it. Therefore there are not really “drafts” as such.
I always “work backwards,” in that the overall shape and structure of a piece of writing occur to me as facets of an almost geometric solid, which means that the development and ending are known before a single word is written.
The interest is entirely in the execution.
Any projects you want to hype?
The recently released NEO-DECADENCE: 12 MANIFESTOS is still in the hype phase, I think. As mentioned, the upcoming NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION will be the most complete crystallization of the Neo-Decadent idea.
Last year I completed a short poetry book called INSTAGRIMOIRE//FAX SCREEN SECT: THE CANCELLATION OF GRAHAM GREENE, VOLUME 1: TALES FROM ORTHOGRAPHIC OCEANS, OR: A ROOM WITH A VIEW (SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONCAVE MIRROR WITH INTERIOR LANDSCAPE & KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES), which I hope to find a home for soon.
I look forward to the release of the graphic novel version of my story DESTROYING SACRED OBJECTS WITH SEXUAL FLUIDS, which Gea Philes is drawing.
If people wanted to work with you, have a chat or buy some of your books or art – how should they get in touch and where should they visit?
I am available on most social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, etc. I am open to collaborations and anyone who wishes to join or start a Neo-Decadent faction is welcome to get in touch.
Any direct support of Chomu Press and Snuggly Books is always welcome.
And for people in Japan, my LINE ID is: justinisis.
Favorite artists, musicians and writers?
I’ve always uneasily classified my literary interests into three groups: 19th Century French Decadents, 20th Century Japanese Modernists, and New Wave SF of the 60s and 70s.
I would say most of my favorite writers can be drawn from these groups: Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Gustave Flaubert, Léon Bloy, Émile Zola, Catulle Mendès, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Cordwainer Smith, Barrington Bayley, Lawrence Miles etc.
Throw in some Aleister Crowley and Djuna Barnes and we’re set.
I don’t know what to say about music at this point. In practice I currently listen to a lot of K-pop like TWICE, and some fairly dubious J-pop. I’ve gone through periods of intense focus on indie rock, post-rock, psytrance, progressive death metal, post-hardcore, etc.
I don’t consider music as important as I once did, as it is mostly just “coordinated sounds” that people without much sense of themselves use to construct an identity while nodding along to a beat.
Gea Philes and Ila Pop are some of my current favorite living artists.
Odds and Ends
Drugs – waste of time or gateway to the universe?
All creative types should use drugs, especially tryptamine psychedelics of various kinds. If you are not doing drugs you are not really keeping up with advances in psychic technology, which means your art will likely suffer as a result.
It is a bit like choosing to ignore AI or social media. You can choose to ignore them, but other people will be delving into areas you’re only aware of in a secondhand way. Much like ignoring the occult, this was perhaps a permissible strategy in the past, but the frontiers have shifted and it means you are choosing to take yourself out of the conversation, in the same way you would be if you decided to ignore certain political realities.
You can’t really decide drugs are a waste of time at this point. Or, again, you can, but in the process you will be choosing a limited and outdated window on reality.
Who was your 1st crush?
…and why were you so infatuated with them?
A friend’s sister, an obese Hawaiian girl with terrible acne. I say “terrible” here in the way the word might be applied to a Biblical angel. I think the asymmetry created by the acne was the source of the beauty.
I don’t think there can be symmetrical beauty, or if there can, I’m not interested in it.
Does sex change everything?
Without a clear context here it’s difficult to say anything meaningful, but desire is the motor of will and action. I’m not sure there was ever a point in my life at which desire and interest in sex were absent.
There was never a world before sex.
In this sense sex is the only hope of anything changing, of there being any motivation.
Sex IS change.
What are the top 3 items you own?
I am not really into ownership and all of my “property” is extremely transient and likely worthless. I am not a collector of any kind, much less a book collector.
In some respects my lifestyle is fairly monastic, though it is filled with great celebration, crudity and opulence.
I have some stuffed toys which have accumulated over the years and which I will include here:
In a battle between the two camp and very decadent writers: Quentin Crisp Vs. Truman Capote – who would win?
…and why would they be victorious?
I find Capote tedious in every way; Crisp on the other hand was a master in every sense.
So it is a bit like a bristly asteroid demolishing a very puny and rotten sickly-sentimental moon.
Please describe your last dream in detail…
It mostly consists of PlayStation II-era video game style “cut scenes” with a “3rd Person Overhead” camera perspective. The setting is an underwear factory in Marrakesh and the protagonist is a Moroccan ninja who is in the process of infiltrating the factory in order to disrupt a group of foreign workers who are producing underwear stamped with racist and Christian symbols.
In this world everyone’s underwear choices depend on their politics, and “Boxers or briefs?” is a question likely to result in a violent duel depending on the answer, or at least a declaration of affinities (similar to the “sans-culottes” in pre-Revolutionary France). “Boxers” are young racist white men who always wear briefs and go shirtless with shaved heads and Dr. Martens boots.
The “viewpoint character” is wearing incredibly impractical clothing for a ninja; lots of robes and scarves and he almost resembles a cybergoth with some kind of gas mask that is also a “war mask” or something the Predator would wear. He is roaming around the factory randomly killing people and lobbing grenades all over the place.
He can go into “speed burst mode” and blitz around rapidly.
At one point he breaks into a kind of conference room and meets up with his “contact,” who is Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes from late-90s R&B trio TLC.
Left Eye: “I’ve disabled the conveyor belt.”
Moroccan Ninja: “And now for the commentary.”
He hands her some kind of apocryphal religious tract, which she attaches to a hair clip and pins to the side of her head in order to give herself a protective aura. The two of them leave the conference room, kill a bunch more “Boxers” (usually by cutting their heads off with swords, or else eviscerating them) and enter a lab facility area where scientists are tending to a giant experimental life form, which is an enormous alt-right potato creature with countless tuber-tentacles.
This giant racist potato is imprisoned in a glass cube and the scientists have attached wires to the outside of this cube in order to monitor its life signs on various computer terminals.
Moroccan Ninja and Left Eye kill the shit out of the scientists and blow up the cube with grenades, which “wakes up” the potato, and it begins flailing its tuber-tentacles everywhere. The potato has a rudimentary face and looks like it was designed by Peter Chung.
The Moroccan Ninja takes out a bag filled with “potato grafts,” which are mini-potatoes of various kinds attached to darts. The idea is that these other kinds of nascent potatoes represent “racial others” to the alt-right factory potato creature.
Moroccan Ninja throws them at the giant potato and the smaller potatoes start growing into its flesh. This grafting procedure results in the giant potato developing schizophrenia and it becomes even more insane and enraged, as well as growing in size. It levitates to the ceiling and then smashes through to the night sky outside.
Moroccan Ninja and Left Eye use grappling hooks to get up to the ceiling hole and head out onto the roof, where they take in the skyline of a Blade Runner-looking city with various airships flying overhead.
The flying schizophrenic potato is using its tentacles to grab civilians from the ground and eat them, and before long the Moroccan government is compelled to send out battle vehicles to combat it. These look like Art Deco-style spider ships and floating fortresses.
Eventually their missiles drive the potato south, towards the Algerian border.
The Moroccan Ninja takes off his mask and sits down on the remains of the roof.
Left Eye (sarcastically): “The giant potato is going to fuck up Algeria.”
Moroccan Ninja: “I don’t care, my contract is complete.”
He takes out a lighter and a glass pipe and starts doing meth hits.
Left Eye: “So it was crystal all along.”
Moroccan Ninja: “Have to keep my pipe stats high, okay.”
Left Eye: “Is my father safe or not?”
He hands her the pipe. “Take a hit and find out.”
I wake up.
Links
- Justin Isis – Website
- Justin Isis – Instagram
- Justin Isis – twitter
- Justin Isis – Audio Interview with Praxis Behind the Obscure Podcast (from January 2021)
- Justin Isis vs. James Nicholas: Divorce Procedures for the Hairdressers etc. – via YouTube (from 2016)
- The Aither – Review of ‘Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos’, Edited by Justin Isis (from February 2021)
- Chômu Press – Website
- Snuggly Books – Website
