First Contact
by Dante
Zefram Cochrane[1] was a misfit, a beautiful disaster of human ambition, and his batshit experiment cracked open the sky and introduced our lonely little species to the cosmic neighborhood. He didn't ask permission. He just did it.
Cough up your coordinates and every week we’ll drop original work straight into your inbox—musicians, writers, visual artists, digital alchemists, and heretics from the heart of Middle America. Work made here and now, by people asking what the hell we're doing on this rock hurtling through space. And yeah, we've got opinions.
This zine is curated, but the door's open: submit your original art and cultural provocations. Keep it real, keep it human-made (we're still figuring out what that means in 2025—so if you've got thoughts, let’s talk about it.
Check submission guidelines for specs here. And listen, this ain’t no orange-grift, artists deserve to eat. Selected work gets $10 cash money plus a $10 book credit at Prospero's. The tactile, hold-it-in-your-hands print zine [Issue 1], loaded with fiction, poetry, video, creative nonfiction, interviews from 23 Middle-American makers— can already be found at Prospero's.
Read it. Subscribe. Spread the word.
Like Zefram standing in front of that warp drive, we're staring down a future that could go spectacularly right or catastrophically wrong. Might as well make some art about it.
Peace, Dante
Inventor of the Warp Drive, thus giving humans faster-than-light travel capability. ↩︎
Carotid Cabaret Live Music Review
by Will Leathem
Model/Actriz perform at The Record Bar, Kansas City, Missouri
Amaranth / opening / through the noise / scarlet beckoning
The room is carotid red. The dance floor, seating and stage vacant. We’re early. I and a concert-habituant buddy grab a table. Securing appropriate alcohol, I stroll over to check out the merch. A man and a woman stand at the table. As I peruse, I make conversation: “You travel with the band or are you KC?”
The man responds in a kind but road-weary exhale, “I guess you could say I travel with the band…”
I look up, “Well shit! Cole.”
In street clothes, sans makeup, he is somehow only a fellow civilian, not the front-man for Model/Actriz. He consents to a selfie before heading off backstage. I add another item of concert gear to my collection and settle in for the show.
The opening “band” (a singer and a drummer): Body Meat, offer only retreads of the currently requisite tropes and musical memes (computer rhythms, bass drops and sudden volumetric switch ups). In spite of a decent voice, they present little more than computer-centric karaoke with a light show. Forgettable. (To be fair, next day I revisit their work via the streams. Forgettable)
Model/Actriz, however, are not.
Down the hall from the green room, a fog-machined concert vid, they came: Cole bounding all Muhammed Ali in black gossamer shawl and elbow gloves; the rest tradesmen striding in T’s and work boots. My buddy and I move to stage left — a better view of both band and fans.
It commences:
Frenetic. Urgent. A Steve Reich-ian phalanx punctuated by abrupt, data-precise rhythmic change-ups. A pervasive underpinning of sonic noise — Jesus and the Mary Chain over Niagara’s falls in a barrel! Tonight’s audience begins to move, to seethe. It could be the opening rave from Blade II, minus the violence and avarice and hatred.
Poppy careens into Mosquito…
I want this life, I want this life, I want this life…
…with a body count higher than a mosquito
Wetmore’s right hand is legato, disciplined. A Johnny Ramone/Gary Myrick rain of downstrokes. Strings dampened, percussively atonal, more rhythm than melody. I watch Shapiro stoop to manipulate a bank of peddles, his pluck hand, fingers tapping just above the pickups, an analogue, human re-visioning of the automated ethos. Radlauer’s hi-hat is staccato; his snare crisp. A weird, bubble-warped, ride symbol, offering up a trashcan lid of punctuation.
So often these days, performers abdicate the humanness to programed algorithmic generators, computer upon computer littering tables. Model/Actriz’s insistence on the materiality of the human performance adds a certain warmness to an otherwise cold musical soundscape — similar to what an old tube amp or audio receiver ads to a listening experience. It strangely evokes a revisioned, tactile, Einesturzende Neubauten performance.
Then there is Cole. One simply cannot overlook Cole even if you wanted (and who would want to?).
Physicality. Not exploited per se, but exposed and explored, directed outward.
When I was five I remember clearly
my want to have a Cinderella birthday party.
Undulating. Sexual. Vigorous. Ambidextrous, yes. Queer in so many senses of the word, but not necessarily evangelical. His trust of the crowd is implicit. I couldn’t shake that I was witnessing a nascent Iggy or Jagger. Such a markedly different persona from the quiet man at the merch table. It was nearly impossible to chain him to the stage. Cole feeds on the crowd. Yet there is reciprocity. Trailing a cable, he repeatedly ventures out into the dancing masses. He climbs atop the hi-tables, a vampiric pole dancer, to rub against the room’s towering pillars. Seated on the floor amidst the sea of bodies, he brings all to their knees to be near him as he softens the dynamic, injects melody. It would be interesting to take in another show, to observe if this symbiosis is from Cole to the audience or the audience to Cole.
Album credits proclaim that the music belongs to the band, but the lyrics are the provenance of Cole. And they offer a definite poetry, sharp-jointed and vulnerable. Amidst this sonic landscape, juxtaposed against relentless, mechanized disharmony, they offer respite, relief, an oasis of unabashed beauty. They capture so well the current existential frontier of dislocation here along the collapse of 1,000 years of culture and the global biome. Is it any wonder so many no longer pay creed to old social-sexual norms? All is turbulent and we are left only to search for someone, anyone, to reach out and touch our humanness?
Just know I'll keep the mirror you gave
Just know I won't leave as I came
One critic tried to describe it as “…dissonance and noise with live belligerence.” They are wrong. It is not belligerence. It is something else. Dissonance, yes. Like the apps that harness atmospheric static to generate uncrackable passwords. To the invited, it offers secure communications with any who posses the key.
Embodying Ouija strength, Nero leaks through my teeth…
enter into my pure mode
Is there a click track? Perhaps. Does the machine pilot from the cloud? Likely. Do i care? No. Like a terminator gifted from some future, the veneer of humanity is real even if encasing the machine.
Model/Actriz leave the stage and do not return. More than a fine, fine show, I cannot help but feel that I have just witnessed something important.
The crowd lingers, fidgets. Again and again begging for more. Its been many a year since I witness an audience so truly, not performatively, wanting more. They ask and ask and ask. For a good half hour they ask…
Leave ‘em wanting the old saying goes…. Everyone did, as did I .
Model/Actriz is:
Cole Haden - Vocals
Jack Wetmore - Guitar
Aaron Shapiro - Bassist
Ruben Radlauer - Drums
To date, they have released two full-length albums: Dogsbody (2023) and this year’s Pirouette (the remix single of Vespers is pretty damn sweet, as well…)
Model/Actriz music can be found here (bandcamp.)
God Bless the NFL
The West has fallen and the crucified Christ has been replaced by the pig skin and the goal posts.
Americans don’t believe in anything but their football teams. If we had it our way – which is always available to us for a small $10 a month fee – we would prefer an unseen thick accent foreigner from the global south that works 22 hours a day to raise our children through an iPad screen while we scream and howl at Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce to get us into field goal range and send us to overtime so that they may reaffirm our prejudices just one more time.
Yes! YES! We are rooting for the winners! God has a favorite team after all! Or does He (or She, or They, or whatever the fuck you need to hear in order to keep reading)?
Every Sunday, every bloody Sunday, we find ourselves rolling out of bed, adorning our robes of our own personal faith, traversing our way to our nearest television set, where we spend the next three hours sweating, chanting, embracing, and (most importantly) praying, that our lord and savior, QB1, can redeem us and lead our damned souls out of the jaws of defeat and on to victory.
Does that sound familiar?
I’m talking about church you football crazed maniac! For God’s sake, I just watched a commercial where Buffalo Bills fans were literally baptizing their infant children by throwing them through baby sized plastic tables. We have replaced the cross with the meaningless wins and losses of a for profit company that is slowly draining our communities’ time, attention, and resources while hiding behind the shield of a patented logo!
The sick joke of it all is that whether or not you adorn the Kelly Green or the Chiefs Red,all of us Americans are fair weather fans. We say we stand for something, believe in a direction of sorts, some kind of loosely guided morals that seem to blur with every passing day, but really we don’t have the slightest clue of who we actually are. We don’t remember what the West stands for – or maybe we do and we simply don’t like what we have become – but damn it Son! How about those Chiefs?
The moment “our guy” or “our party” turns out to be a spineless AIPAC sell out or, God forbid, a gang of pedophile mercenaries, we seemingly always find a way to turn the other cheek, determined to not let the “other side” see the smear of shit running down our face.
God forbid we bother to look up from our mechanized and individually designed life path of self betterment, progress, and touchdown, touchdown, touchdown that is spoon fed to us by thousands of flat screen televisions. Maybe then, if we found the damn remote to turn this GARBAGE PRODUCT off, we might realize that we are just a small blot of color on a much larger canvas. Maybe then, we would remember a time when the West was a symbol of peace,safety and strength and not an endless loop of self identity masturbation slop.
I’ve got a strange little itch in the back of my head telling me my good ol’ American education was a lie. Was the West ever a shelter for moral responsibility, individual dignity, and democracy? Did we ever protect the unique cultural celebrations that made our communities great? Or have we always been begging to pay $130 for a colored jersey that screams “I eat whatever shit they tell me to eat and I’ll come back again and again if it means my team will eventually win”.
Now that the symbol of our people is a reality television star who spray paints himself orange and uses his power and credibility to take advantage of young girls, we cling to our Super Bowl bragging rights like company store credits.
We have nothing left. Our moral compasses are spinning out of control and we are in crippling debt and Christ won’t save us. Whatever we used to believe in (God, love, family, community, whatever) has been dethroned, discarded like trash, and we have filled the void with endless commercials, war games, and silver penis trophies (yes, your favorite football player did just kiss the tip. He’s a champion after all!)
The only thing left I have to say is may God bless the NFL, because it’s all we got left.
Deon Morrow
by Deon Morrow
Deon Morrow is a contemporary artist from Emporia, Kansas, with work exhibited across the United States and internationally. His paintings center on movement as more than motion, they are studies of feeling, presence, and the charged moments that shape how we remember and connect.
Through layered color, gesture, and rhythm, Morrow captures the fleeting intersections of emotion and experience, turning everyday scenes into something lasting and alive. At the heart of his practice is an ongoing pursuit to “Bring the Love Back,” creating work that invites adventure, tenderness, reflection, and a renewed sense of closeness.
