The 100 top public intellectuals
Really, these guys made the list? Sadly so from Sadly No!
The legacy of Bowie’s Hauntology
Last week Steen Christiansen posted an introduction to his essay, David Bowie’s Hauntology, which was accepted for a most interesting conference, Uncanny Media.
My initial random thoughts led me to associate the Hunger, the first postmodern vampire film which co-stared Bowie alongside Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. Which led to a review of the band Bauhaus, whose cult classic song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is featured in the opening scene being performed by front man Peter Murphy.
That review of Bauhaus has apparently vanished in a most uncanny way into the digital ether. Perhaps my review and the relationship between Bauhaus and Bowie’s hauntology was not so clever so I won’t try and recreate it. However, I’ve just learned that Bauhaus has recorded and released a new album, the first since their breakup some 20 years ago. Bauhaus was a central band for me in the 80’s and this new album, from the tracks I’ve sampled, sounds every bit as authentically Bauhaus without sounding kitsch like so many “reunion tour” bands do.
Bonus. The album art and poster was created by the legendary “street artist” Shepard Fairey. See his signature Obey Giant logo at the bottom left, next to the signature Bauhaus logo.
Update: Well, I just couldn’t resist. I haven’t received my album (ok, it’s a CD and I know that too is just so last millennium) yet my signed and numbered Fairey prints (both the black and silver) arrived this morning!
Tags: Film, Journals and Publications, Music, Reviews, The Arts and CultureOrdinary finds
Bent Sørensen’s latest distraction (and mine), Ordinary Finds has just been added to my blog role. I love this style of blogging, which is akin to a personal mental “news agitator” of all the interesting stuff he encounters online. This looks deliberately different from Bent’s other online blogging like his personal cultural studies blog or his mostly “academically oriented” writing at america adrift.
I was also pleased to read there that Wood S Lot, a fantastic culture/theory/aesthetics portal, has provided some much appreciated ‘blog love’, linking to both Rosi Smith’s essay Seeing Through the Bell Jar: and my essay, Don DeLillo and Society’s Reorientation to Time and Space: in the as peers journal.
Tags: Announcements, BloggingABC hearts McCain: this puree of pure irrelevancies
Paul Rosenberg slices and dices the latest ABC shrill for McCain. A great analysis exposing the practice of subjective balance or perhaps imbalanced objectivism.
The post also contains a link to his terrific review of the new book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by David Brock and Paul Waldman of Media Matters. My copy was delivered this morning.
Anyone with an ounce of sense listening–sans kool aid–to this puree of pure irrelevancies would immediately conclude that McCain was showing the strains of his age, and needed to take a good long nap-say until sometime after the November election. Except of course, that such witless blathering has become totally normalized as a mainstay of our political discourse over the course of the past three decades.
Out of the Bag again and behind the curtain
After last week’s ABC Democratic primary debate, the Bag posted a great series of TV frames as a visual recap to the debate. I wrote;
This is by far the most succinct summary of last night’s debacle of a debate TV show hosted produced by ABC News Disney Entertainment. This captures the essence of what is, “the postmodern condition” of US politics.
I selected this image as the most telling frame of the set. More »
Tags: Environment, Media and Media Theory, Politics, Popular Culture, Postmodernism, Propoganda, Visual Semiotics