Birmingham, Alabama. Photo: Samm Bennett. All rights reserved. Roomful of Ghosts, the new release from Samm Bennett, is pure awesome, a sob and a chuckle and a whoop and a yowl, dredged up dripping from the mucky riverbottom of his bi-cultural bad self. (“Bi-cultural” because Bennett, an ubiquitous presence on the New York downtown music […]
WHAT: Lecture at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. WHEN: Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 PM. WHERE: School of Visual Arts, Room 101C, 133 West 21st Street, Manhattan. WHAT, EXACTLY: A 45-minute lecture, with visuals, followed by the usual bloody scrum, on: “The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror” The […]
Pardon my gratuitously exploitative title, but I had to grab you by the eyeballs somehow. Now that I’ve got your attention for what my Sitemeter informs will likely be 21 seconds at best (the Attention Economy is shriveling, here at Shovelware as elsewhere), let me tug on your sleeve about two new anthologies that feature […]
I’ve got a “reported opinion” piece on the Orphan Works Act—a radical overhaul of Copyright As We Know It, brought to you by the The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombie Legislators—in the December issue of the graphic-design magazine Print. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford lawyer who launched the Creative Commons movement […]
This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I’ll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra’s Arkestra. The Basics: “In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra’s work, setting them within the context of African-American culture’s […]
Bite the Wax Tadpole in the ’80s, making hypothermia fashionable. Left: Darren Smith. Right: Mark Dery, sporting what some claim is a mullet, but which he will insist, to his dying breath, is not. Discreetly buried on this site, at the end of an interminably long, shamelessly self-aggrandizing biographical blurb written in the Bob Dole-ian […]
This just in: a Los Angeles Times essay, pegged on former White House flack Scott McClellan’s memoir, about the transformation of politics into a branch of special effects, and of the White House into a Hollywood backlot. The restless shades of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays haunt the West Wing. But beyond this obvious point, […]
Detourned image, courtesy Misha. bOING bOING sprinkled holy water on my blog (I Am Not Worthy), and now faithful and godless alike are weighing in, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio: a handful of closely reasoned, well-argued responses and a farrago of spittle-flecked invective, Alpha Mensa threat-posturing, and off-topic maunderings from the flying snark monkeys. Like […]
Image: Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick. I heartily endorse the New Atheists’ strategy of taking the firefight to the enemy’s doorstep. As someone who is truly soul-sick of his fundie relatives’ condescending, culturally arrogant prayers that he find The Light© before he’s cast into the lake of everlasting fire, I’m thrilled by the new strain […]
Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at “The Sacred & The Profane,” a conference at San Diego State University. Official Blurb: In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in ’70s Southern California In this lecture, equal parts personal essay and cultural critique, […]