Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • the feared disseminators of complexity

    A new discovery, made within Simon Reynolds’ response to the shuttering of Beyond the Beyond: Matti Swiedmann’s Red Velvet Corridor. Top of the stack of posts at present is this thing, rambling around in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard… all the intervals in that haunting earworm of a scale that…

  • det är hundens liv

  • dead media beat

    Thanks to Jay Springett and Uncle Warren for alerting me to the sunsetting of Bruce Sterling’s old Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired, which I only stopped following because Wired yanked the RSS on it some time ago—this despite its being perhaps the most influential thing they ever published, or ever will publish. Jay’s accompanying…

  • (against) a world that is hollowed out, closed off, sold off, “safe”

    I hadn’t heard of freelance ed-tech thinker and avenging angel of firebrand rhetoric Audrey Watters before Sentiers linked to this transcription of a recent keynote of hers… but from now on, I’ll be keeping an ear out for her work. If you’d now please all stand for a rousing chorus of “Fuck the Hot Take…

  • neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental

    Medium-length essay here by Rob Nixon, whose “slow violence” concept was briefly introduced to me back in early March at a little symposium thing in Utrecht; I’ve acquired the book, obvs, but it’ll likely be a while before I get to it, and I wanted to put up a quick placeholder for it on the…