Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • 2020 in books

    This year, as many years before, I had hoped to both increase the amount of books I read and write about what I read here on the blog. The latter has been rather less successful than the former, though not without good reason; after two months of preparing to relocate and near-as-dammit ten months of…

  • the reason for this pilgrimage

    Clipping this primarily because I suspect it will make an excellent case for thinking about the mirrorscreen idea I was kicking around earlier this week: I visited an elaborate recreation of the Virgin Mary’s appearance in a French grotto in 1858. A narrow footpath led through a forest to a candlelit statue of the Virgin…

  • the ubiquitous fictionality of narratives of futurity

    Doing that thing where one quotes a famous and respected person saying things one has been saying for years, in the hope that it’ll be more palatable coming from someone famous and respectable. Once again, it’s yer man KSR, of course: All attempts to speak of the future are science fiction stories, and thus bound…

  • den andra sidan av spåren

  • duckrabbit, figureground, mirrorscreen

    In this episode of Excerpts Of Other People’s Output Used For The Aggrandization Of Personal Theories Which Remain Stubbornly Underwritten, I will be quoting a newsletter from Drew Austin, riffing on Kyle Chayka’s “ambient TV” essay; the bolding is my own. Describing other ambient shows like Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” which combines pleasant food imagery with…