🏴Haunted. As I was on my first teenage viewing of Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated cyberpunk film Akira, in a small theatre on Haight-Ashbury San Francisco — a film reference that comes easily right now, as I watched it a second time on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know what it was about Akira that affected my disaffected youth. What I remember feeling was audio-visual enthrallment & an existential atmosphere that was too much, too soon. Set in the future (2019) against the beat of bamboo percussion, “Akira” is the eponymous name of the boy who, afflicted with extrasensory perception, destroys Tokyo, which becomes the catalyst for world war, government corruption, religious zealotry, teenage biker gangs & everything that composes a dystopian fantasy, including a gravitational singularity that turns the world inside out with abject & mystical results. Amidst this flattening of a world, where power is taken through the high-risk stakes of corruption, science, technology & immorality, a brotherly friendship gets derailed as a boy begins to exhibit Akira-like ESP. I wonder what Otomo was thinking & feeling when he made Akira in 1988; the same way I wonder what is going through Bassam Al-Sabah’s head, but mostly heart, in his solo IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS at DHG. I am tempted to think, even though feeling is what I’m left with. The same feeling on experiencing Bassam’s work the first time 6 years ago for his BA. Then I had no script. Today I’m not going along with the press release of “intersectional glitches” occuring “within the body, gender, & within internal & external worlds and ever-present technology.” Or the perceptions of masculinity & the techno-aesthetic of the glitch in the makeup of the work itself. Other than those robotic subtexts, already in the social ether, the work (to my heart) resides in the sensual & homoerotic body (that arm!) & the issue of being a desiring machine in the midst of an adesiring identity politics & aesthetics. Perhaps in 20-odd years I will revisit it in words when the styrofoam dust has settled & my heart has stopped beating so fast🏴