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journalismalienated 11: blinded with aperture science
Marshall McLuhan was fond of observing that the content of a new medium is always an older medium. He would likely have taken a certain amount of satisfaction out of the notion that the job of popular music in 2008 is largely to serve as the content for cell phones and video game consoles. Legal downloads of digital songs from the iTunes Store alone outsell most traditional record stores. Downloads of ring tones for cellular phones regularly outsell the singles on which they're based. (Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)
alienated 9: zombie parablesWe all know it but someone has to say it: zombies are the new vampires. Vampires had a lovely sort of fin-de-siècle decadence about them that perfectly suited the mood of the late 20th century. Rising gas prices, the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, neo-liberal pundits running the world markets into the ground with all of their dot-com bullshit about a "weightless economy," 9/11 looming on the horizon, boy bands ... the party was coming to an end, and, deep down inside, everyone knew it. So why not emulate the monster most likely to eat the other guests (and do so with a modicum of style, at that)? Style exacts a stiff price, though, even among the undead. Pancake makeup takes a long-ass time to apply smoothly, and all of that black leather, velvet and lace is expensive, heavy and difficult to launder. This is the real reason that the only people interested in dating vampires and their gloomy kissing cousins, the goths, were other vampires and goths: vampires are the ultimate in high-maintenance girlfriends. By the time the beautiful and spooky actually finish dressing and are ready for a night on the town, most of us are pretty much looking for breakfast. Enter the zombie: the ultimate low-maintenance monster. Crumbling, shambling, moaning, driven only by the neverending search for more brains to consume, the zombie has become the cultural mascot of the early 21st century.
a slap in the face
Il faut epater le bourgeois. Rebellion isn't what it used to be. At the beginning of the previous century, becoming an artist was a relatively straightforward process. All you had to do was figure out what everyone living in or near the centre of your culture -- people that, for reasons which have become unclear over time, even the non-French call "the bourgeoisie" -- was doing, and then simply not do that, as actively and aggressively as possible. If you and some of your friends decided to not do something that everyone else was doing in the same way, you could start an ism, and plenty of people did. Before too long, the zone that ringed the cultural centre was thriving with new isms. It was a heady time, with throngs of people running around epater-ing the bourgeoisie with all of the things that they weren't doing in the same way as everyone else.
down and dirty
low highlights on a musical timeline March 1935: "I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb / I got something 'tween my legs'll make a dead man come" – Lucille Bogan's definitive version of "Shave 'em Dry". October 1956: In-between teaching Jerry Lee Lewis to play piano and co-writing Elvis' first number one hit, Charlie Feathers releases "Can't Hardly Stand It," the blueprint for greasy, deceptively sloppy-sounding rockabilly songs about gettin' drunk and cheatin' from here until the Cramps. Thom Jurek on Feathers: "like a flood on a suburban street – the sewer blocks up and all sorts of crazy shit pours out into the gutter".
gravedigger
"Get your dancing partner and take her over to Four Apostles." Those are the first words that I hear most mornings from Arnold the foreman during the summer of 1988. I’m working at the Chapel Lawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery Crematorium & Funeral Home, just outside Winnipeg. Four Apostles is one of half-a-dozen football field-sized burial gardens, almost all with bland, inoffensive Biblical names: Good Samaritan, Last Supper, Resurrection. (Almost all. Right inside the gates, always, inexplicably, there’s Babyland.)
matrix 4: new voyages
My theories about the intricacies of this transformation are fairly convoluted, but to keep this article rolling along, I have thoughtfully prepared a concise little chart:
matrix 3: a valentineAir Jet (3)
matrix 2: you whores
We all have our price. What's yours? Bill Drummond knows. And he ought to: on August 23, 1994, he burned a million pounds of the hard-earned money that you paid for the albums he produced as one half of the KLF, aka The Jamms, aka The Timelords, aka The Justified Ancients of Muu Muu. It took about an hour, and, by all accounts (okay, only one: that of journalist Jim Reid, the sole witness), it was kind of boring.
matrix 1: under difficulties semi colon
Marquis comes into his office early one morning only to find, to his considerable surprise, "a giant cockroach jumping about on the keys":
writers of the world, unclench
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Darren Wershler (aka Darren Wershler-Henry) is the author or co-author of ten books, most recently, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (McClelland & Stewart, Cornell UP), and apostrophe (ECW), with Bill Kennedy. Darren is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program. alienated.net is the most visible part of Darren's brain. links: status update
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