“Backgammon is sometimes called the cruelest game. In 2008, during a snowy November outside Moscow, two strangers played on a board that one of them had carved in a labor camp. When the match ended, the winner got up, walked out of the room to get a knife, and then made good on their wager: ‘We had agreed to play backgammon– whoever loses dies,’ he explained at the time of his arrest.”
From “Chaos of the Dice” by Raffi Katchadourian in The New Yorker, May 13, 2013.
“This,” I thought, “is a mundane world. Now that the world has ended, people are being driven about under that light by evil thoughts. Innumerable couples are gazing at each other under that light, and in their nostrils is the smell of the deed that is like death, which already is pressing directly on them. At the thought that these countless lights are all obstructive lights, my heart is comforted. Please let the evil that is in my heart increase and multiply indefinitely, so that it may correspond in every particular with the vast light before my eyes! Let the darkness of my heart, in which that evil is enclosed, equal the darkness of the night, which encloses those countless lights.”
Check out this great interview with Animal Kingdom contributor Beck Levy!
“I’ve been wandering around crowds of freaks and falling asleep in recording studios since I was a kid which probably contributes to why I’ve always felt like an outsider in punk scenes. Punk wasn’t this thing that saved me from my adolescence or made me feel less alone, it was just one other venue in which I felt alienated.”
Animal Kingdom Publishing 