The World According To Veronika Sprinkel
Stories from Dystopia's Bright Side
Paranoia isn’t always neurologically induced. Sometimes, it’s created. Sometimes, people seeking power harness it to cull control—a classic move from the demagogue’s playbook. Look back in history and you will see republics shaped by paranoid thinking.
...instead of spreading wildfire, I’d incinerate injustice wherever it lay. Stoke crackling flames and burn bigotry down. Render it erased. Like they did in Minneapolis, on Newark and Detroit’s long, hot summer streets. The “language of the unheard” remains undeterred until all people are free. Hopefully, by the time my next life starts, there’ll be no need to fuel more fires...
My heart had shriveled up from the inside out. It desperately needed water. So I tossed my hound dog Pablo in a big silver truck and sped off for the Oregon coast. Twisting two-lane highway hummed under our wheels. Italian doom metal surged through the stereo. This sonic concoction split open my veins and let life’s irrelevance drain free...
As a musical genre, punk's not commonly considered to be riddled with nuance, suggestion, or surprise. What you see is what you get. It's either on or it's off. Loud or louder. Rude, bombastic, brutal. Like it or go the fuck home. But every now and then, someone or something comes along to challenge everything you thought you knew...
The Melvins? Who are the Melvins? My eyes panned down to find Smokehouse drummer sitting a few feet away on that very floor where I’d been sleeping, next to an empty turntable. It was his cigarette I smelled: Marlboro. Carefully, he rested a shiny black twelve inch onto its surface and dropped the needle. Seconds later, I found myself inundated by a sound so immense, I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut with my own steel toed boot, in the most incredible way...
"Photography is an exercise in problem solving. I’m interested in things that start and end. I can see the process. I like that putting together. Building and rebuilding and destroying. Destroying is probably part of the thing that I like the most, because it allows me to rebuild..."
"In those moments when we go out of the ordinary, where we’re breaking the path, this is what we remember. This is what life is based on. When everything is on schedule, on time, there’s nothing to remember. It doesn’t leave an imprint. I think that choreography, or the creation, or the timing is what moves you along. In between is you and the present, and the moment that you’re learning from..."
"...I always find myself being closer to who I am when I work with nonprofessionals. I feel like I’m closer to something more authentic, something more real, something more broken if you say. Something that asks more interesting questions than forms that are perfect. Forms that are perfect remain in a sort of clinical state and don’t touch as much as when the realness of that broken form shines through. I like the periphery so much.”