Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: history

  • history is constantly being re-animated, re-mixed, and re-heated

    Dang, how have I missed out on reading Aaron Z Lewis before now? Please excuse the following long stream of lengthy excerpts, but there’s too much good stuff here to pass by… Each subculture has an implicit understanding of its “ideological conversion funnel”. This phrase, borrowed from digital marketing, refers to the stages that people…

  • the arcade fire

    A long ol’ piece on Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus by Apoorva Tadepalli at Real Life. It’s the sort of epic longread that merits at least a second thorough go-thru (and has as such been stashed away to that end), but this bit leapt out as being Relevant To My Interests, as the old meme used…

  • Media archaeology with dirty hands: Mattern (2017), Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

    Mattern, S. (2017). Code and clay, data and dirt: Five thousand years of urban media. U of Minnesota Press. This is an exemplary introduction chapter for many reasons, and one of things I admire most about it is the tone: it’s critical of the “smart cities” memeplex, without a doubt – framing the book’s project…

  • Escape was the purest form of resistance

    A longread (at, er, Longreads) on pirates and maroons and freedom in the Caribbean during the time of the triangular trade. Like someone went out and did the research legwork on Hakim Bey’s Pirate Utopias. I like the following paragraph in particular, partly (of course) because I agree closely with its analysis, but also because…

  • Roamin’ roads, redux

    The WaPo [via the good folk at Moving History] reports on some interesting research which comes to a conclusion that (I hope) no regular reader here would be surprised by: current geographical levels of population and prosperity in Europe correlate strongly with the Roman road network laid down around two millennia ago. Dalgaard and his colleagues…