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, […]
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, […]
What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age. Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on. When: I’m delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here. Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103. […]
Apologies, all, for the long silence. The fall semester has begun, and the professorial life (at NYU, where I teach) has swallowed me headfirst, taking the usual Great White-sized bite out of my time at the writing desk. Nothing but tumbleweeds blowing down the desolate main street of this blog, the batwing doors of the […]
Boy from Brazil: Ah-nuhld cathects the carrot. Back from lecturing about sex, society, and Netporn in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for which I had prepared myself, as I told my audience, by screening the 1983 Playboy video “Carnival in Rio.” Hosted by a helmet-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger, groping everything within reach of his pithecanthropoid arms and nudge-nudge, […]
You are cordially invited to… Another (!) lecture on Netporn, the subject that has captivated minds and moistened loins around the world. This talk is part of the Frontiers of Contemporary Thought series, jointly produced by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the University of the Sinos River Valley (UNISINOS) and Copesul, […]
Humpback anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii). Any more thoughts on the questions I posed? Still curious to hear your thoughts, especially on recent sightings of the squid or octopus meme. In the meantime, a postscript to my last post: Kristeva gave us the Abject. Baudrillard gave us the Simulacrum. Freud gave us the Uncanny, among other unforgettable […]
Battle of the Titans: Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and Sperm Whale locked in mortal combat in the vasty deep…of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life. When Clive Thompson ran an item on his brain-fryingly great blog, Collision Detection, about a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) that fishermen hauled in off the coast […]
Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial (“Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans’ infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences,” May 3, 2007). I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O’Reilly.