This isn’t innovative. What might be somewhat new is that, at least to me, it seems that for a work of art to be “successful” it is far more important to use the chosen symbolic language effectively than to say anything terribly innovative. A novel message presented without artifice would not be as effective as a trite message presented skillfully.
Read MoreIn the McLuhanian read, an adaptation is just the old medium being placed in the new medium wholesale. To an extent, this is true: all adaptations are going to have baggage from their original version. The number of people who declared that they would leave the theater if the sound effects of Wolverine’s claws in the first X-Men movie didn’t match the “snikt” noise used in the comics was mind boggling. Of course, that was stupid. Because “snikt” is a nonsense word and English orthography isn’t 1:1 – if you don’t believe me, just google “ghoti.”
Read MoreI label this process “Copization,” to parallel it to the evolutionary biology phenomenon of “carcinization”: there are a complex of evolutionary pressures that lead ten-legged arthropods to develop into remarkably crab-like forms. Copization, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby genre stories that feature violence as a central component have a tendency to evolve into a form that more closely resembles a police procedural.
Read MoreThe book that Mark Fisher was working on at the time of his death was to be entitled Acid Communism. Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. There has been a lot of speculation about this subject since his passing, especially in conjunction with the last course that Fisher was going to teach on “Post-Capitalist Desire." The general theory is that Acid Communism was his name for a future political project, marrying the psychedelia of the 1960s to Marxist thinking,
Read MoreLet us look at nostalgia itself, because nostalgia is what we’re taking aim at here. The pain of homecoming. Let us take a more medical or therapeutic approach. If we view being a Nostalgiac as a bad thing, what is the treatment for it? What is the plan of action for rehabilitation?
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