Category: AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU’RE HOT

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, THINKING TO THE NTH ON THE TOPIC2 Comments

WHY, YOUR THREE-YEAR-OLD COULD HAVE DONE THAT! MY LIFE THUS FAR IN ART

Steven Augustine

    Art, real Art, can be created with the cheapest, most common, materials. It doesn’t require a gallery for context or validation; it doesn’t require an explanation or a backstory or a validating slot in the display case of the Official History of Art. It inspires more Art and inoculates frail flesh against boredom, poverty, loneliness and old age. When wielded en masse it can be a supple weapon against venality, brutality, anality and the shitty Isms of Race, Sex, Class and the Fasces. Talent in one or more of the Arts is a gift from the Prankish Gods and … Continue reading WHY, YOUR THREE-YEAR-OLD COULD HAVE DONE THAT! MY LIFE THUS FAR IN ART

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, from the DEPT of I SHIT YOU NOTLeave a comment

SONTAG’S EASTER SURPRISE: UPDATED

Steven Augustine

Now this IS fun (and of course, of COURSE, SS knew from the very beginning that this would eventually come out and lift her plinth another meter or two). I don’t, for a minute, doubt it.* (And Oh, young people, with your zealously faddy, bandwagoningly superficial polemics!) When I read this “revelation,” this afternoon, it made me think of something I’d read, a while back, in Edward Field’s book “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Literary Portraits”  (2005),  a kind of orgiastically-LGBT behind-the-scenes contextualizer for many of Modernism’s Flagship Avatars, and their works, that I found … Continue reading SONTAG’S EASTER SURPRISE: UPDATED

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, HUXWELLIAN, THINKING TO THE NTH ON THE TOPICLeave a comment

SOC-MED GADFLY R US…

Steven Augustine

…because there is precious little well-argued push-back against any number of social engineering projects currently running.  One key-word, in c. 2008, in a Google search on a controversial subject was enough to trigger a cascade of links to dissenting opinions; to try it now is to find a baffling (and terrifying) uniformity of Tone out there. Have We changed that much… or has Google? Manufacturing a normative attitudinal consensus among the Soc Med Target Demos is now as concrete a step, before passing New Legislation, and implementing new restrictions on Speech and Thought Crime,  as the process of  bribery-based “sausage-making” … Continue reading SOC-MED GADFLY R US…

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, STRANGE BUT TRUE, THINKING TO THE NTH ON THE TOPIC, WEBBY TITTERSLeave a comment

TRUTH-WIT’S PHLOGISTON

Steven Augustine

Good stuff. Not quite sure what the “stuff” is but it’s good. An academically-trained practitioner of the bodily-invested postmodern breaks down c. 30% of The Internet for us: extremely funny, nicely horrifying and data-rich with fetchingly honest asides. Highly recommended if you’re over forty and don’t often trawl the paraverse of the toxinet…   PART TWO: My take on the Trans Movement    Authority in self-identification would appear to be a (modern or postmodern) human right, but why is there no analogous (to the Trans Movement), credible, self-determining race-change movement? E.g.: there are lots of people with combined “black” and … Continue reading TRUTH-WIT’S PHLOGISTON

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, The Late Epiphany, THINKING TO THE NTH ON THE TOPIC4 Comments

KUBRICK, THE FUTURE and HIS BLACKEST COMEDY

Steven Augustine

In the late spring or early summer of 1980, like quite a few people, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining at a first-run theater. Unlike most people, however, I was living at a Funeral Home when I saw it. To be accurate, I wasn’t quite living there that night; I was merely staying there, having returned, only temporarily, on a visit. I had lived in this family complex, of three houses, in Philadelphia, in the late 1970s. The first two floors of the middle house of the complex housed the Funeral Home, with its slogan on the illuminated marquee on … Continue reading KUBRICK, THE FUTURE and HIS BLACKEST COMEDY

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

ATTACK of the PHALLIC FOREHEADS (in HD, 1955)

Steven Augustine

At seven or eight years old I’d run home from grammar school (the front of which, with its flagpole, a block distant, could be seen from our kitchen window) to watch The Early Show, on channel 2, a showcase for Sci Fi flicks of the 1950s. By 1963 these flicks were still roughly valid but shading rapidly toward the culturally camp and obsolete; when Modism, and then Psychedelia, began to take over, starting in ’66, cinematic Sci Fi became  a sack of silly relics until Fantastic Voyage, Planet of the Apes and (obviously) 2001: A Space Odyssey re-dignified the genre. … Continue reading ATTACK of the PHALLIC FOREHEADS (in HD, 1955)

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, SUPERIOR LIT, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

THE GRAND DELILLO

Steven Augustine

  Don DeLillo is branded (and is a Brand) as the Elder Statesman of America’s paranoiacs… despite an obvious tonal aversion to atrocity. This is ridiculous. If Norman Mailer hailed the work of Paul Bowles as heralding the death of the Square, the Square is here to inform Mailer (the way God informed Nietzsche) that news of said death was greatly exaggerated… and, also, that that Don DeLillo guy is a way-out proposition, man. Don DeLillo is no Paul Bowles, as far as that goes: he’s as safe as warm milk before bed in the 1950s. He’s no square-killer. He’s … Continue reading THE GRAND DELILLO