Somehow, though, famously bad – or just forgettable – movies like Super Mario Brothers, Waterworld, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, Event Horizon, Starship Troppers, and Demolition Man are getting treated as hidden gems. Some of these I see the point with, others I don’t. Hell, I’ve done similar things in my own life with such films as Mystery Men. Is this simple nostalgia, or is it something else?
Read MorePart of this has to do with a thunderous absence in the contemporary period, something that has been present for so long and no longer exists in the context of our time: where is counterculture? It’s entirely possible that I have simply been passed by, that I’m no longer plugged in to the same networks that I was at one time. However, it definitely seems to me that there is a decided and somewhat worrying absence of a unified counterculture at this point in time. It feels like the moment at the top of a roller coaster when you can no longer hear the chain clanking along, but just before the drop happens — the mechanism isn’t involved any more and the mechanics have taken over.
Read MoreBut the painting was only the prestige medium for a certain period of time, and it has been superseded by other media, just as it, in turn, replaced other media. We can think of the pre-modern period as the age of sculpture or theater. We can think of the later modern period as being dominated by the novel and film. The postmodern period is dominated, largely by television.
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 Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher.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 MoreI’ve been struggling with it, myself. I have to ask: how do we keep the forward momentum on our projects when we have to rent our bodies for hours every day just to keep hot food in our bellies and a roof over our heads?
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