Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: culture

  • gastric culture / mundane noise horror

    There are lots of reminiscent reflections (and some predictable bafflement) in this MeFi FPP-thread responding to the recent un-deletion of the KLF’s back-catalogue, almost thirty years after the event… but this one was an interesting enough image that I wanted to clip it for posterity (if only my own): I sometimes wonder whether pop isn’t…

  • all that mattered was sensation

    Much delayed by pandemic disruptions of international mail, here’s a transcript of a heretofore unpublished J G Ballard interview, originally done for an Italian VHS video zine (!) in the Nineties. Comes in both Italian and English, with an accompanying essay by yer man Simon Reynolds… which is presumably where I heard about it, shortly…

  • as events evaporate (material virtuality / virtual materiality)

    Harbingers of middle-agedness, #836: your journey around/along the dialectical Möbius strip of culture brings you to points when echoes of multiple previous moments thereupon reflect back at you at the same time. Point in case: Kieran Press-Reynolds on the phenomenon of the virtual rave [via Reynolds Senior]. I’m old enough to not only recall the…

  • geography of fear / fear of geography

    Back when I used to live in Velcro City’s original namesake, I remember being told many times over, by many different sources, that difficult cases of social exclusion or dysfunction were often tagged by overburdened social workers in the area with the acronym NFP—“normal for Portsmouth”. Quite how normal (or not) those cases actually were—and…

  • the next underground

    TFW Simon Reynolds appears to have been rifling thru your list of near-future short-story ideas: It seems unimaginable, but it’s possible that the next underground will exist entirely off-line.