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 […]
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 […]
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 (!) […]
My essay, “Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California,” appears in the new Cabinet. This is the latest in a series of essays I’ve been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late ’60s and ’70s.