Shovelware

The Reluctant Afronaut

Mark Dery — 2009-06-22T10:34:59-05:00

CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web.

WHAT:"Solar Flare: Sun Ra's album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note": my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93.

WHERE: HERE.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION KEYWORDS: Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, graphic design from Alpha Centauri, black starliners, Afrocentrist UFOlogy, space jazz from Betelgeuse.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

"A world away from the smoky, cellar-jam-session cool of [most jazz] album art, the handmade aesthetic, do-it-yourself ethos, and ripped-and-remixed imagery of [Sun Ra's] album covers and promo materials are of a piece with [the composer's] bricolaged cosmology. Desperate to escape what Ra biographer John Szwed calls the 'racially possessed' America of the Jim Crow years, Ra built an alternate worldview from scratch, cobbling it together from Flash Gordon futurism, mail-order Egyptology, Biblical hermeneutics, and 19th-century occultism. Long before men walked on the moon, Ra knew, in his bones, that he was part of the 'angel race.' Like a trans-racial Marcus Garvey beckoning humankind toward his intergalactic starliner, he urged space migration for black and white alike. The El Saturn graphics are a part of this sprawling star chart, a cosmic Baedeker pointing to Other Planes of There."

Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty (Giftware #3)

Mark Dery — 2009-06-13T15:37:35-05:00

Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."

Another shameless wallow in '90s nostalgia: a lengthy book excerpt uploaded to SCRIBD, this one from Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

READ IT HERE.

BUY IT HERE.

From the SCRIBD blurb (written, again, in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Although it was published in 1996, on the eve of the Digital Revolution, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century stands the test of time.

To be sure, some of its references have passed their sell-by dates, but much of Dery's cultural critique of the ideologies of digital subcultures---their political myths and religious subtexts---still rings true. Escape Velocity explores the '90s digital subcultures and popular movements that both celebrated and critiqued a newly wired world: cyberpunk SF, technopagans, transhumanists, cyber-hippies, and rogue roboticists such as Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, to name a few.

PHOTO: CREDIT/COPYRIGHT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Mark Dery — 2009-06-04T14:38:53-05:00

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.
Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

O Come, All Ye Unfaithful

Mark Dery — 2009-06-01T16:54:35-05:00

Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as "Jew Like Me," "Zen Mind, Alkie Mind," "Agnostic Front," "I Was a Prepubescent Messiah," "Banana Slug Psalm" (is there a bandname in that, or what?), and the incomparable "Bible Porn" (sects sells!).

My contribution, a true confession about my brief-lived career as a teenaged Jesus Freak in the mid-1970s, is called "Jesus is Just Alright," a title that inspired Sharlet to write, in a note he enclosed with my contributor's copy, "I've been wanting to use that as a title for years, but never could figure out what. I'm glad you showed me the way."

Long ago, in the lost world of the '70s, when I never missed an opportunity to "witness" to the unsaved, I might have replied, "John 14:6: Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'"

Mercifully, I've seen the light.

Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque (Giftware #2)

Mark Dery — 2009-04-01T11:07:52-05:00

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.

Delirious Urbanism

Mark Dery — 2009-03-25T16:31:16-05:00

"I knew Sterling when he was an Aztec pimp": the SF writer and Fine Young Ballardian Chris Nakashima-Brown, quoting William Gibson talking about Bruce Sterling. Neither of us could parse Gibson's one-liner, but it had a certain corkscrew logic to it.

La Nave de los Monstruous. (Ship of Monsters)

Nakashima-Brown and I were in Mexico City last week, along with Sterling, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, and Linda Nagata, for "Parallel Worlds," part of the venerable Festival de Mexico en el Centro Historico. (I gave a lecture titled "Myths of the Next Five Minutes: A Science Fiction of the Future Present," which used Ballard's 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash as a jumping-off point for some speculations on the cultural role, and literary possibilities, of science fiction after the extinction of the future and the obsolescence of utopia.)

Outside the Tlaltelolco conference hall. L-to-R: M. John Harrison, Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Chris Nakashima-Brown, your host, Christopher Priest.

Mexico City is the capital of the 21st century, to borrow the subtitle of David Lida's First Stop in the New World, an addictively readable, pants-splittingly hilarious dérive through the world's second most populous city (Tokyo is the first) and undeniably one of its most vibrant. Lida's book is an intellectual luge ride through The Labyrinth of Solitude; a videogame for virtual flaneurs, based on Benjamin's Arcades Project but relocated to the D.F. (Distrito Federal), with a nonstop Mex-tec soundtrack.

Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns (Giftware #1)

Mark Dery — 2009-03-10T14:42:09-05:00

Recently, while ego-surfing GOODREADS, I stumbled across a review of my 1999 meditation on millennial America, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium:

"i re-read this book and enjoyed it as much the second time. its focus is really on some of the darker threads of the fin-de-millennium american culture. end of the century apocalyptic schizo kinda stuff. killer clowns, branding, post humanism, aliens, and conspiracies. it is just as relevant now as it was when i first read it at the end of the 90's. it confirms to me that somewhere near the end of 2001 time started running in reverse..."

Naturally, the thought that everything old is new again gives hope to those of us midlist authors languishing in the remainder bin of history. Then, too, there is an almost '90s-style sense in what was once referred to (in all seriousness) as our American empire, that the gyre is widening, the center cannot hold, and the tassel-loafered Wall Street swine jostling for space at the public trough should be driven off the nearest cliff. On bOING bOING, Dan Gillmor sounded a portentous note:

"Like lots of folks these days, I find myself speculating about whether we're heading into something worse than a bad recession, such as the kind of calamity that tests civilization. Back in my younger days I played music for a living. [...] At one point, gloomier than usual about humanity's future, I wrote a song about how people like us would (or wouldn't) get along when the apocalypse happened, something I feared might be imminent. It wasn't, then, but I'm wondering again."

Deep in the comment thread, a reader named Dainel wrote, "All this talk of doom reminds me of 1999. Don't anyone remember that? Is every one here less than 20 years old?"

True, the militia movement seems to have switched into dormant mode (although white supremacists still fantasize about bringing The Turner Diaries' Mother of All Race Wars to a bloodbath near you). And the omens of millennium that darkened American dreams a decade ago---alien autopsies, black helicopters, Heaven's Gate suicide cultists, Timothy McVeigh-style Angry White Guys, Unabombers who just wanted to watch industrial society burn---have given way to a low-lying despair, the deepening sense that the United States of the near future is going to look a lot like the Weimar republic in its last, hyperinflationary days, when people were using banknotes as wallpaper and postage stamps had a face value of 50 billion Marks.

Still, Wired is once again waving the techno-libertarian flag, though its triumphalism is a bit frayed around the edges and looks depressingly like garden-variety neo-liberalism (with a dash of Gladwellian screw-the-spotted-owl contrarianism to validate its cubicle-warrior coolness quotient). 24 is the new X-Files. Unfrozen CyberGuy Kevin Kelly---who was wondering, not so long ago, "Say the Dow hits 100,000 by 2010. Would that surprise you?"---is back with yet more musings on the Unabomber. The inimitable Terence McKenna is no longer with us to hawk his '90s vision of the Coming Singularity at the End of Time™, but a flock of McKenna epigones---the Marjoes of the magic mushroom set, the Robert Schullers of psychoactive alkaloids---are barnstorming the Esalen hot tub-and-Burning Man circuit with suspiciously familiar-sounding talk of a zodiac mindwarp in 2012.

What better time for me to catch the last wave of the '90s revival, disaggregate The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, and offer up a few chapters for your delectation, in PDF form, courtesy Scribd?

Here, then is, my first donation to the Creative Commons:

"Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns," from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

(I still hold copyright to this essay, obviously, but encourage readers to re-post and re-publish it at will, as long as you add the following boilerplate:

©Mark Dery; this essay originally appeared as a chapter in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

A link to the online bookseller of your choice, or to the Pyro page on this site, would be the right thing to do.)

In the Scribd blurb, I synopsize it as follows (in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.

Keywords: evil clowns, clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, Cacophony Society, culture jamming, Batman, The Joker, R.K. Sloane, Shakes the Clown, Jim Knipfel, The Fool, Stephen King's IT, Quentin Tarantino, American pathologies, Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, Arkham Asylum.

"Can't sleep, clowns will eat me..."

(Thanks to Gareth Branwyn, for his kind words about my essay---the inspiration, in part, for my decision to donate it to the Gift Economy.)

Always Crashing in the Same Car

Mark Dery — 2009-02-20T22:40:00-05:00

All together now: "Warm leatherette/ Melts on your burning flesh/ You can see your reflection/ In the luminescent dash ..."

For the fervent Ballardians, especially the obsessive completists among them, who enjoyed last week's post, I've archived PDFs of the various versions of my lengthy, in-depth interviews with JGB and director David Cronenberg, published in 1997 to coincide with the American release of Crash, Cronenberg's film of the Ballard novel of the same name. (The files in question are actually housed on the free, brutally cool document-sharing site Scribd, which David Pescovitz of bOING bOING brought to my attention. (Thanks, David!, as they say on bb.))

J.G. Ballard: Pathologist of the Postmodern

Mark Dery — 2009-02-12T09:25:15-05:00

My review of J.G. Ballard's nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly.

Read it here.

"Nonfiction," meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones's Love and Consequences, and in light of Ballard's bestselling autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and its less-than-bestselling (but by my lights more lyrical) sequel, The Kindness of Women, both of which are forthrightly fabulist.

Ballard's latest account of his Shanghai boyhood, his wartime years in a Japanese-run internment camp for British civilians, and his postwar exploits, playing the discreetly subversive Marcel Duchamp of New Wave SF (to Michael Moorcock's gonzo Salvador Dali) while raising three children single-handedly, may be his last, or at least his penultimate, book. As devout Ballardians know, the 78-year-old author is battling advanced prostate cancer. Ballard's longtime agent Margaret Hanbury is reportedly shopping a report from the cancer ward, Conversations with My Physician (mordantly subtitled The Meaning, if any, of Life), but Ballard's condition casts doubt on whether he'll have the strength---or time---to midwife the manuscript through the publishing process.

Alabama Song

Mark Dery — 2009-02-10T12:16:48-05:00

Roomful of Ghosts, the new release from Samm Bennett, is pure awesome, a sob and a chuckle and a whoop and a yowl, dredged up dripping from the mucky riverbottom of his bi-cultural bad self. ("Bi-cultural" because Bennett, an ubiquitous presence on the New York downtown music scene of the '80s, was born in Alabama, studied African percussion in Nigeria, and lives in Tokyo.)

now the mayor tried to shoot me and the governor called me dumb but the president gave me a banjo string and a piece of chewing gum

how do i love thee baby
i'd like to count the ways
but all the reasons they keep going
in and out of phase

The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror

Mark Dery — 2009-01-30T13:32:26-05:00

WHAT: Lecture at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. WHEN: Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 PM.
WHERE: School of Visual Arts, Room 101C, 133 West 21st Street, Manhattan.
WHAT, EXACTLY: A 45-minute lecture, with visuals, followed by the usual bloody scrum, on:
"The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror"

The eye is an erogenous zone; beauty and horror, aesthetic ecstasy and moral revulsion: philosophical binaries aren't always poles apart, in the aesthetic realm.

In the world after 9/11, the aesthetic eye is confronted---and the moral mind confounded---by images that are undeniably horrific yet in their own ineffable, ethically dissonant way, beautiful: blurry newswire images of jumpers leaping from the burning Trade Towers; the Towers themselves at the moment of impact, blossoming into terrible flowers of flame. The cognitive dissonance inspired by such images, and the outrage sparked by aesthetic responses to images so emblematic of horrific tragedy (Karlheinz Stockhausen, white courtesy phone...), opens the door to a contemplation of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the pathological sublime"---images or objects that confound the aesthetic gaze, flickering irresolvably between aesthetic seduction and moral revulsion.

That contemplation takes us far afield from 9/11, leading us to wonder about the awful, pitiable beauty of medical museum exhibits; the "installation art"-like crime scenes left behind by highly ritualistic killers such as the Black Dahlia murderer; the troubling persistence of Beautiful Dead Women---exquisite corpses?---in art and high fashion; and the Burkean sublimity of that 20th century icon, the nuclear mushroom cloud. And speaking of mushroom clouds, Walter Benjamin warned his readers, in 1936, that humanity's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic."

Do his words have special meaning for us, in the world after 9/11? Is the aestheticizing of the unspeakable the essence of the fascist imagination, which dreamed of a Nazi utopia consecrated to Aryan beauty and purified by "racial hygiene"? What are the limits of the aesthetic gaze?

Gordita Porn

Mark Dery — 2008-10-17T10:15:02-05:00

Pardon my gratuitously exploitative title, but I had to grab you by the eyeballs somehow.

Now that I've got your attention for what my Sitemeter informs will likely be 21 seconds at best (the Attention Economy is shriveling, here at Shovelware as elsewhere), let me tug on your sleeve about two new anthologies that feature my byline:

* Hunger and Thirst, a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry on the subject of gastronomy from the San Diego-based indie press City Works, and

* Pr0nnovation? Pornography and Technological Innovation, an anthology of lectures from the first Arse Elektronika conference (which I keynoted, in San Francisco, in September 2007), published by the legendary underground press Re/Search in conjunction with conference organizers Monochrom, an "art-tech-philosophy collective" based in Austria.

First up:

The publisher's blurb half-heartedly ballyhoos the book with a decidedly listless blurb: "Technology's development (Photography, Cinema, The Internet) is often pushed ahead and funded by pornography. This book explores that connection. [...] The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Immediately after producing his famous bible, Gutenberg used his press to print erotica. Photography was utilized just as quickly. And so the technological advances continue." Indeed they do. And as J. Danforth Quayle memorably observed, we don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. (Cue "It's a Bright, Big Beautiful Tomorrow" from the GE "Carousel of Progress" ride at Disneyland.)

BUY IT HERE.

WHAT YOU GET: Annalee Newitz ("A Futurist's History of Sexual Technology"), Violet Blue ("Ceiling Cat Hates Your Porn---Sexual Privacy Online"), Jonathan Coopersmith on "The Democratization of Pornography" (DIY porn), Carol Queen on "Your Grandmother's Vibrator," Katherine Zakravsky's "Brief History of Cultural Genitals," and much, much more, my friends, including, not least, your friend. I've got an essay in this thing, titled "Cowgirls and Werebabes: When Porn Leaps the Species Barrier," about the "humanimal" porn of the do-it-yourself far-fringe fetish pornographer Nexus T. His illustrations, reproduced here in all their blurry, low-res, iPod nano-sized black-and-white glory, will leave big, unsightly blisters all over your mind, tender to the touch. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Playboy Philosophy.

Next up:

The blurb on City Works's site describes Hunger and Thirst, edited by Nancy Cary, as an approximately 375-page collection of "poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art" in which "more than eighty contributors offer up unique views of food and drink, what we hunger for, what pains us or sustains us, what brings us joy as individuals, as family, as culture." I contributed an extended dance mix version of my Salon essay on Taco Bell, the Americanization (read: deracination) of Mexican food in Southern California, and my Proustian quest, in New York, for the hybrid border cuisine of my SoCal youth.

BUY IT HERE.

WHAT YOU GET: The abovementioned 80 contributors, plus my essay, which includes:

* Soul-wrenchingly profound meditations on the soul food of SoCal culture---the hybrid consciousness of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, wrapped up in a tortilla.
* An answer to the question that has been gnawing a hole in the American mind, namely: How is the original Taco Bell sign---the proverbial lazy Mexican dozing against a cactus, shaded by a cartoonishly huge sombrero---to Mexicans as the golliwog lawn jockey was to American blacks?
* How to pronounce "Toast-AH-duh," in strict conformity with 1970's Taco Bell menus.
*A harrowing descent into the American racial gothic, with its shuddering recoil from the "abominations of Mexican cookery," most notably Mexicans' "indifference to the existence of dirt and grease" (not to mention their "appalling liberality in the matter of garlic" and their "recklessness in the use of chili colorado or chili verde").

All this, and more appalling liberality, in Hunger and Thirst and Pr0nnovation.

Copyfight

Mark Dery — 2008-09-24T12:18:48-05:00

I've got a "reported opinion" piece on the Orphan Works Act---a radical overhaul of Copyright As We Know It, brought to you by the The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombie Legislators---in the December issue of the graphic-design magazine Print.

Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford lawyer who launched the Creative Commons movement and who thinks deeply about copyright (and who, be it said, I interviewed for this article), gave it a little shout-out here.

If the subject of copyright law doesn't exactly blow your skirt up, hark to my words:

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lose everything you've ever done." That's Brad Holland, from a recent interview with business consultant Mark Simon. Holland, a legend among illustrators and co-founder of the advocacy group The Illustrators' Partnership of America, was referring to the Orphan Works Act (OWA), a proposed revision of copyright law that the IPA---and the more than 60 other organizations that have joined its cause---believe will have a catastrophic effect on artists. On the fast track for a vote in both houses of Congress, H.R. 5889 (The Orphan Works Act of 2008) and S. 2913 (The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008) would open the door to "wide-scale infringements" of creators' copyrights, according to a statement on the IPA's website. For most visual thinkers, the subject of copyright law is pure chloroform. Still, it matters as never before, so pull up a chair...

Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alex Curtis, Brad Holland, and Hannibal Lecter all make cameo appearances in this thing.

Brother From Another Planet

Mark Dery — 2008-09-14T21:18:10-05:00

This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I'll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra's Arkestra.

The Basics: "In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra's work, setting them within the context of African-American culture's relationship to technoculture and sci-fi mythology."

I'll riff, too, on Ra's self-taught hermeneutics and voodoo numerology, the deeply gnostic strains in his music and philosophy, the homosocial ethos that undergirded his band's experiment in communal lliving (as well as its historical relation to American utopian communities), his pop Egyptology and UFO-ology, the relationship between his often hand-drawn record covers and the notion of landscape paintings and psychedelic record cover art as evolutionary precursors of virtual reality, and Ra's sci-fi theories of race.

The Details: Here .

Turn Me On, Dead Man

Mark Dery — 2008-07-11T10:02:51-05:00

Bite the Wax Tadpole in the '80s, making hypothermia fashionable. Left: Darren Smith. Right: Mark Dery, sporting what some claim is a mullet, but which he will insist, to his dying breath, is not.

Discreetly buried on this site, at the end of an interminably long, shamelessly self-aggrandizing biographical blurb written in the Bob Dole-ian third person, is an embarrassing admission:

Long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, [Dery] pulled off a passable impersonation of a male Patti Smith during his brief-lived career as a performance poet. Since 1985, he has collaborated with the composer/multi-instrumentalist Darren Smith as one half of the music/spoken word duo Bite the Wax Tadpole.)