Category: Culture
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Post Truth 1
Two stills from Adam Curtis’ excellent polemical documentary, Hypernormalisation. They’re from a section on the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and the parallel collapse of any sense that any grand claims could be trusted, among a people who had been asked to believe one pack of lies, and then revolt, only to –…
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PonoPlayer, Chilli Kebabs, and the End of HiFi in an Instagram World
Over the past week or so there’s been quite a bit of coverage given to Neil Young’s announcement at SXSW of a Kickstarter to raise money for the ‘PonoPlayer’ – a super-hi-fidelity music player that hopes to rival the iPod, and blow people away with the quality of music reproduction. Aside from my opinion that…
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Life, Writing and Being Useless
(soundtrack to this post: ‘Wasting My Young Years‘ by London Grammar) Posts here have been a little thin on the ground, mostly due to the fact that I’ve been work very hard on the manuscript for a novel – more news of which I hope one day to be able to share, but I’ll shut…
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Walt, The Wire and The Waltons – Thoughts on Breaking Bad and The Wire
As Breaking Bad draws to a finale (last episode airing on Sunday / Monday) I wanted to post some quick thoughts – clear warning, this may therefore contain spoilers. It’s become a bit of a truism to say that it’s the best thing on TV, but it really has been an immensely enjoyable series. I…
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The Trauma of the Infinite
In a recent post examining notions of time and our relationship to it, Peter Rollins concluded: Instead of the eternal being simply the ongoing now (the pagan notion), this understanding sees the eternal as the dwelling in all three registers. This is nothing less than the combining of past, present and future into a mass…
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Revolutionaries or Decorators? | Art, Brutality and Transformation
Been meaning to post something on this for a few weeks: on holiday this summer I read (recommended by an Italian friend) Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island. He’s a very good but pretty bleak writer, with a very disturbing vision of humanity. The TLS describe the book as ‘a charging bull in…