This blogging thing is thirsty work. Give me enough Premoistened Lemon Pledge Wipes, and I’d rather clean the Augean stables. I’ve been under the hammer of a dozen deadlines, hence my absence from the bully pulpit. That’s my cover story, anyway.
Prophesied to last a millennium, Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. Scripted to end–if it ever ended–in the melancholy grandeur of triumphal arches wreathed in ivy, its tawdry finale turned out to be a self-inflicted bullet in Der Fuhrer’s brain, as Soviet tanks rumbled into Berlin. The Third Reich’s […]
Tomorrowland rocket ride, Disneyland, circa 1960. Courtesy The Imaginary World. © Dan Goodsell 2005. My essay, “In Search of Ancient Astronauts: A Requiem for the Space Age,” appears in the new Cabinet magazine, issue 18. Key Concepts: Ray Bradbury, “Rocket Summer,” aeronautics workers in Southern California in the ’60s and ’70s, Tomorrowland, children’s books on […]
Stuck on fast forward, we’ve accelerated to the point where our multitasking, instant-messaging speed tribes are experiencing an eerie nostalgia for the present—an ironic world-view in which every experience is framed in air quotes. Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.
Believe it or not, people are still having sex. The religious right’s jihad against sexual expression hasn’t put a lid on the American libido. (Note: The following article originally appeared, under the same title but with different photos, in the spring/summer ’05 issue of Vogue Hommes, pps. 244-7. Under the inspired, focus-groups-be-damned guidance of Editor […]
Sunshine/Noir: Writing From San Diego And Tijuana, edited by Jim Miller, is out, and I’ve got a lengthy essay in it, titled “Loving the Alien: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Become Californian.” It’s an autobiographical rumination on the ontological migraines I suffered as a palely loitering lit geek, growing up among San […]
Erik Davis: hermenaut; bearded Led Zep exegete. Photo: Mindstates II website. In Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3/ Continuum International Publishing Group), Erik Davis manages the neat trick of making Robert Plant’s cosmic-dirthead lyrics sound like outtakes from The Mabinogion. (This, remember, is the man whose idea of rock poesy is “I got my flower/ I […]
UPCOMING LECTURES Thursday, May 19: San Francisco “The Sexual Grotesque: Pomosexualities and Robopathologies on the Web.” (Details below, after address and directions).
Just back from Mexico City, where I lectured on nostalgia (lecture title: “The Dismemberment of Things Past”) at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, as part of Cabinet magazine’s “Nostalgia” conference, and, later, solo at the Casa del Lago (lecture title: “Evil Empire,” a Baudrillardian critique of late-imperial America’s geopolitical arrogance and excess). Thanks to the bush-beating […]
April 29/30: I’m speaking at a conference on nostalgia, hosted by Cabinet magazine in partnership with the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, in Mexico City. (Details here.) Luc Sante, Celeste Olalquiaga, and others, me among them, will be picking apart the notion of nostalgia. I’ll be lecturing and sitting on a panel about time machines (!) […]