WHAT: A Boing Boing special feature, wittily designed by BB designer Rob Beschizza. READ IT HERE. This, and the other mind-crushingly awesome images in this post, were created by the photographer Max Oppenheim and prosthetic artist Bill Turpin, based on the grotesque caricatures of ’70s yearbook photos in Charles Burns’s graphic-novel masterpiece, Black Hole. All […]
From Russia, with love: The hardbound Russian translation of my 1996 classic of cybercrit, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, randomly illustrated with blurry, migraine-inducing black-and-white photos. I can’t vouch for the translation, since I don’t read Russian. And I’m frankly a little nonplussed at the smoking hole in my front lawn […]
CULTURE: SeaWorld orca show. Found online. All rights reserved. NATURE: Found online. LIVE, NOW, AT TRUE/SLANT: “When Animals Attack!: On Gordon Grice’s Deadly Kingdom“ READ IT HERE. THE VITALS: The unnatural acts of wild animals penned up in zoos, or forced to perform in theme parks and stage acts, or treated like family in peoples’ […]
Found on the Web. Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies. HERE, at True/Slant. Teaser: The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The […]
“How not dumb is Gaga?,” asked the New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, in the first flush of Gagamania. Almost exactly a year later, his question still furrows the American brow. Okay, I’ll bite: Not? As in: Not in the least not dumb? READ the rest of my True/Slant essay on Lady Gaga, HERE. Lady […]
David Bowie, on bended knee, praying the Lord’s Prayer at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness, Easter Monday, April 20, 1992, at Wembley Stadium in London, before a crowd of 72,000 and a live TV audience in 76 countries. “I felt as if I had been transported by the situation,” Bowie remembers, in […]
“It’s a god-eat-god world…” – David Bowie, “I Pray, Ole.” (Lodger-era outtake; included as a bonus track on the 1991 Rykodisc reissue of the album.) Photo: Mick Rock. Copyright Mick Rock; all rights reserved. In the penultimate (!) installment of my serialized essay “How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another,” at Religion Dispatches—my […]
Apparently, I left a few headstones unturned in my exhumation of the deeper meanings of the Zombie meme. Live, now, on True/Slant: Dead Metaphors: What Do Zombies Mean?, Part 2. Quote: “In the aftermath of econopocalypse, when the needle of ideological polarization is far into the red, the zombie is rising again to put a […]
The Walking Dead; all rights reserved. At True/Slant: “Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?” The zombie is a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery’s horrors; white alienation from the darker Other; Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths; the post-traumatic fallout of the AIDS […]
LIFE magazine cover story on the “Christian Woodstock,” Explo ’72, a music festival organized by the conservative group Campus Crusade for Christ. Fair Use. The third installment of my sprawlingly epic essay on the subterranean connections between the “conservative counterculture” of the ’70s Jesus Freaks, the bong-fueled youth culture of the day, and a Bowie […]