ARMED CELL #1

I've been reading Brian Ang's new magazine Armed Cell while in bed with pneumonia (pneumonia! people still get pneumonia?!), finding all kinds of interesting stuff like David Lau's "Tiqqun" poem ("We are in a civil war, irremediably there") and Jeanine Webb's theses ("In the future, dolphins will no longer own stocks or attack drones."). According to Ang, Armed Cell "seeks to publish what is urgent and necessary in poetry and poetics" but it does so by very specifically situating itself among the big dogs like Badiou, Zizek, Agamben and others. He continues:

It insists on militancy "working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety" (Alain Badiou) to confront the notion of there being at present "too much anti-capitalism" (Slavoj Zizek) and not enough direct action against "capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history today" (Giorgio Agamben). Armed Cell seeks relationship with those engaged in research and practice with this matrix of concerns, in order to be, like Lenin's pre-revolution withdrawl to study Hegel, a site for the study necessary for executing political actions.   

There's plenty of interest here, for sure, like Dan Thomas-Glass's "100 Partial Theses on Beauty," but I think I was most won over by Wendy Trevino's "Phalanstery for Imaginary Friends" which I reprint here in its entirety to pique yr. interest:

Phalanstery for Imaginary Friends

"In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations."
-David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

Bloo was like a hippy telling a Buddhist to shut up
Becacuse he wouldn't stop telling people to shut up
Because throughout the war they'd been so

Quiet Eduardo was like Cesar Chavez and Che shaking their heads
Like Pinky mirrors Firefly in Duck Soup like who wore it better
Frames dresses and action figures the last that nobody

Comes in Wilt lost like most of his arm was imagined tall
Father stay at home like a Coca Cola-iced tea taste test
Grandma sister's husband's brother &

Still alive Coco could do slapstick but only at podium like Harpo
Like that was a curse contingent with credit the university's call
For jihad against the Cotillion PTA the criminalizing of

Slapping Mr. Herriman fought in one of the wars worried he enjoyed
Shopping for his girls too much sent them all to college
But was mostly tired always between meetings a

Communist Cheese was post-Dr. Strangelove pre-something id shaped smudge
Spread around the eyes of Jackie Kennedy in the commonest
Of dreams the passports & degrees counterfeit

Armed Cell is free and can be had from Ang directly here: armedcell[at]gmail[dot]com.