Madeline > Recent Status Updates

“No one likes blood thirst unless it mimics their own.”

“I had assumed that at some point, some cinematic life path options would present themselves to me & I wouldn’t even have to think twice about choosing the countercultural anti-chic option, but that was never going to happen & I was a dumb fuck for thinking it would. I was just an escort who lived in a nice neighborhood, enjoyed indie bookshops, vacations in the global south, & going to the farmer’s market.”

Just finished act 1! Love a lesbian murder bimbo lolz

“A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception.”

Not sure I agree with this

Semiotics: made up of signs that are seemingly straight forward but subtly communicate ideological or connotative meaning and perpetuate the dominant values of society.

This book aims to identify/compile the semiotics Kim Kardashian has attached herself to to becoming a living myth

Information filtered through other sources as simultaneously trustworthy, necessary and unreliable / multiple sources and methods of transcription through the novel (an ex’s friend, different doctors, covid call, child’s crying, a writer interviewing a professor, a man speaking with dementia, etc.)

failure of the medium to work properly during the death bed Covid call in the hospital, the use of other mediums (the nurse’s personal phone) to demonstrate the abundance in the face of failure (it might work

Versus the interview. Writing someone’s account and passing it off as if it’s direct transcription/the disappointment of others in this realization, but what about our accepted forms of transcription?

Thoughts/ transcriptions are, inherently, not first person accounts, but the accounts filtered through a medium. New communication platforms/technology becoming extensions of ourselves/our mouths, so as to feel we are no longer using a medium to communicate - what’s lost when we don’t communicate directly face to face?

Emmy using a medium (iPad) to overcome her eating issues,

“We all hear phantom voices. It’s a question of the right conditions, or the wrong ones. Unconscious inference, our brain guessing, making us hear what it thinks is likely there. We hear ‘as if.’ We are, together, erring. You are not disappearing into privacy. Hallucination, too, is social. We must sometimes adjust our antennae, no?”

“I don’t understand how you permit them. That she sat in my house, my granddaughter. Head bowed over her so-called tablet. That she cannot lift her eyes to mine. Even if the light is blue, it is a black hole for the eyes. You know that I do not suffer from nostalgia, I am a partisan of the new. But only when it admits distance. Head bowed as if in prayer, this tiny creature.”

“The air is alive with messages. Messengers, angels. The question is, do we have ears to hear? Although sometimes we listen without them.”

“It is my people who must stand as the shadow that reminds you of your failures. It is our memory that must keep you on the good road. It does you no good to pretend that we did not exist and that you did not destroy us. This is our land, we will always be here. You can no more remove our memory than you can hide the sun by putting your hand over your eyes.”

Imagine your grandma’s skull in a museum exhibit.

“There were little girls playing with dolls and little boys who were just learning to walk. The soldiers killed them all. Then your people had the nerve to talk about massacres by the Indians. Do you know why we ambushed the soldiers? Because we were trying to keep them away from our children and babies and our old people. We had to get to them before they got to our families.”

“The king’s body is apportioned among his people. To his household staff go the muscles of his back. To the garrison, his thighs and calves. To the refugees, the tender meat of his arms, soft and succulent from the years of idleness after he last lifted a sword.”

“I sup on flesh and bone, petal and root, the same as you, but more rarified things besides: lust and longing, fear and ecstasy."

2/2 Arguing that fast fashion is not the fault of the working class should not be taken for an assurance that life can carry on as normal. If things continue as they are, the working class will just sink together beneath rising sea levels.”

1/2 “Imagining that the right to buy limitless clothes at whatever cost to the planet equals freedom is to lose sight of what freedom actually means. Fast fashion is not pro-working class, it must be critiqued as a product for corporations’ drive for profit, not as the fault of the poor.

3/3 It is the working classes that are forced by low wages and the homogenization of high streets into shopping or working at cheap shops like Primark. It is also the working class that are driven to anxiety and a sense of inadequacy for not being able to ‘keep up’ with fashion.”

2/3 It is the working class that are held captive in sweat shops and have their unions smashed by Walmart and have their homes flooded or turned to dust by climate change. It is the working class that end up wearing poor quality clothes that easily wear out and are quickly scorned as unfashionable.

1/3 “Fashion environmentalists are often accused of being elitist and of using fast fashion to blame the poorest members of society for climate change. Should fast fashion be left alone because it makes working class life better, in the same manner as cheap flights? The short answer is no. Fast fashion is a false emancipation that is disastrous for the global working class.

“It is no coincidence that under capitalism, the things we are taught to aspire to are ruling class symbols of cruelty and power over nature. Furs and skins. What is a luxury skin handbag in a Paris boutique other than a sign that you are rich and powerful enough to command and destroy nature, that you can have living things die for your decoration and pleasure?”

“Rather than exist in harmony with eachother and the planet, humans are taught to measure themselves by their distance from the rest of the population and from nature itself. Bertol Brecht (not sure if I’m getting right name here bc of audio) described alienation as ‘the splintering of human nature into a number of misbegotten parts.’”

“Under capitalism, we relate more to commodities than we do to nature itself. We no longer see ourselves as a part of nature, rather nature is something to be gloriously conquered for profit. Everything becomes property. Land becomes real estate, animals become fur, the Lake District becomes a nuclear waste dump, and oceans become sources of fish. Everything must have a profit squeezed out of it.”

Living pythons have a hose inserted in their throats, are pumped full of water, impaled on a meat hook and skinned alive.


Foxes, minks, and dogs are farmed en masse for their fur in China, Finland, and the USA.


Horrifying, heartbreaking information.

Capital has a vampiric relationship with nature, a living death maintained by sucking blood from the world - Marx spoke of this

“Fashion is a deregulated, subcontracted, trend based industry that relies on selling billions of short life units every season at a maximum profit. Brands sell clothes that are not of the highest quality, ensuring that they can make them cheaply, that they will wear out, and that you will be forced to buy new ones.”

The throwaway culture encouraged by domination of exchange value over use value.

Environmental Data Justice Lab: indigenous led, indigenous majority lab that focuses on the relationships between data, pollution, and colonialism.

Ultimately, denial and indifference has one purpose. It makes exploitation easier. This exploitation of the planet, of animals, and of people is the beating heart of the fashion industry.”

“The fashion industry’s relationship with the future is deeply disturbing. It is simultaneously obsessed with the future and unable to confront it. As an industry, it constantly looks ahead and yet, it won’t. Fashion wants to be the future, to construct it by defining what new things we should lust after and yet it refuses to see the looming precipice this approach has created.”