Scrawl
2017-01-10
Scrawl–Punk Rock for Grown-Ups: A Retrospective
So what does it mean to make rock music that speaks for the responsible older sibling; for the friend who cleans up after the party; for the people who won’t leave work early for the party, because they need the extra hours; for Mom? How would that sound? It might sound like Scrawl.
ended up screwed by the record industry. of course! but what a great band.
The future of performance art
2017-01-10
This Is Not an Interview with Poppy
What do you think people will think of social media in the future?
People aren’t going to think in the future. We will become one knowing consciousness.What drove you to YouTube as a medium for your work?
I like YouTube because it is owned by Google. Google is the biggest which means it is the best.
completely taking the piss.
The Mekons
2016-10-17
A Skeptic’s Guide To The Mekons
If the Mekons were what you claim they are, in other words, everyone would already know and acknowledge it. That they don’t is proof you’re wrong.
The irony here is that this line of reasoning is precisely what has always obsessed the Mekons, the very thing that a lot and maybe most of their best work is about: Does it matter what you say if no one really cares about it?
“Blood and Guts TV”
2016-10-13
MOVIE REVIEW: Christine is an arresting biopic about a reporter’s on-air suicide
Indeed, seeing both movies is a richer experience than seeing either one alone. One says nobody should make a Christine Chubbuck movie. The other defiantly says, “We’re gonna make it after all.”
Jerusalem by Alan Moore
2016-10-06
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight
[…] the nature of the book means that there will be two types of reviews of it. The first type will come from comics and geek-culture websites, whose reviewers have rarely read anything more taxing than X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. A 1200+-page literary novel is, pretty much by definition, going to overwhelm them, and they’ll say so.
The other type of reviewer is the writer for the arts pages of the broadsheets, and they will compare it to books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Lanark. They’ll mention the chapter written in the style of Finnegans Wake. They won’t say “this is a big, hard, book” explicitly, but they’ll only refer to it in the context of famously-difficult works.
The fact is that Jerusalem does merit comparison with all those other books — like them it is a monstrously clever, awe-inspiring book, an omnium gatherum that uses different literary styles and genres, that ties together all the author’s thoughts in one massive explanatory, exploratory, novel.
astrology
2016-09-11
When had astrology become our irrationality of choice? Probably sometime around 2012, when things were not so good for us. When you’re feeling stuck, one way to convince yourself change is in the near to middle distance is to read a horoscope. It didn’t matter that the mechanism by which it worked was dubious: cosmic forces emanating from the ordered motions of celestial bodies, wiggling down through the atmosphere in invisible rays to be inspired by human lungs. A broken clock is right twice a day, and weren’t there plenty of things we took to be true without understanding how they worked—GPS, menstrual synchrony, gluten? Our horoscope, at least, gave us something to look forward to. We weren’t idiots, just a little depressed, and comforted by this garrulous pseudoscience that advised, encouraged, cautioned.
A theory
2016-08-25
The Berenstein [sic] Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe
In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992.
Some explanations have been proposed.
via A.V. Club
“Monica”, by Hera Lindsay Bird
2016-08-23
The Friday Poem: “Monica”, by Hera Lindsay Bird
And to be able to maintain a friendship
Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy
Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were
postcapitalism
2015-08-24
The end of capitalism has begun | Books | The Guardian
New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.
I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”
