Blog

Unpacking My Library

A while ago, the technoculture writer David Pescovitz—whose mind was probably elsewhere at the time—rashly asked me for a reading list. He was curious to know what was on my nightstand. (He’ll rue the day he asked, before I’m done.) Typically, I have a half-dozen books I’m picking up and putting down, in my desultory way, reading a few pages here, skimming a chapter there. The presumption, at least subconsciously, is that this hodgepodge will form a sort of montage in my mind, inspiring intertextual conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities. (At least, that’s the theory…) Literary ADD meets Freudian free association.

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On the Beach

Caveat lector: This summer, I’ll be posting even more infrequently than usual (!), which is to say: about as often as Kohoutek comes around. I’ve got my head in the big, shaggy maw of a book-in-progress, and unlike those authors who roll over in their sleep and snore out a book a year, effortlessly, I […]

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The Savage Eye: War Porn, Video Beheadings, and the Politics of “Just Looking” in the Age of Abu Ghraib

I’m lecturing in Baltimore this Friday, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. If you’re within hailing distance, bum-rush the show. When: Friday, April 7, 7 p.m. Where: Falvey Hall, Brown Center What (From the official press release): Sponsored by MICA’s language, literature, and culture department, cultural critic Mark Dery explores the far fringes of […]

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The Leisure of the Theory Class: Academy Hacking with McKenzie Wark

In another life, the Australian media theorist and cultural critic McKenzie Wark was (in his words) a “lapsed Marxist in the pay of Rupert Murdoch”; his provocative column, which ran for nine years in The Australian newspaper, was an Improvised Exploding Device in the salons of the Australian intelligentsia, inflicting collateral damage on–and inspiring fiery […]

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Spam Lit

If only Tristan Tzara had lived to read spambot subject lines, some boiler-room hacker’s idea of a foolproof strategy for bluffing your way past spam-killer defenses. “Be godparent or osteology,” admonishes today’s first hunk of junk mail, a Dadaist ultimatum if ever there was one. What mental-ward wisdom hides in this love-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway dualism? Does […]

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Vinyl Fetish: “Scary Cute” in I.D. Magazine

Can “pop”-ness be quantified? Is there a quality, inherent in the shiniest, rubberiest, squeakiest, squeeziest expressions of disposable culture, that can be distilled into pure essence of pop? If so, what is it? A product’s giddy embrace of its instant obsolescence? An earnest attempt at mass appeal that stumbles unwittingly into kitsch or camp or […]

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Axles of Evil

Courtesy Propaganda Remix Project; all rights reserved.. What with pound-of-flesh gas prices; Bush’s tax incentive to stimulate SUV sales, unbelievably; an anti-terrorist driving school offering tips on high-impact ramming techniques and high-speed evasive maneuvers for dealing with death-racing terrorists (or just garden-variety road ragers); and the cheese monkeys’ recent eco-vigilantism against our gas-slurping behemoths, my […]

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Time Bomb

Image copyright Time; all rights reserved. The other day, as I was musing idly, one foot in the remainder bin, the other on a banana peel, Time came calling, out of the blue. They were interested to know if I’d be willing to play a walk-on role as fringe futurist in their “What’s Next” issue […]

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Crossing La Linea

As mentioned earlier, the Sept./Oct. issue of Print magazine includes my feature on Mexican-American visual culture. Last summer, I interviewed cholo, Chicano, self-styled “pocho,” and expatriate Mexicano illustrators and graphic designers in L.A., San Diego, and Tijuana; this article draws on those interviews, as well as an extensive conversation with the brilliant Chicano cultural theorist […]

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