Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • On the road again: upcoming appearances

    My career as a musician never really got anywhere, but that doesn’t mean I don’t end up touring…  

  • The medium is the message: why I’m sick of Twitter

    I’ve been thinking a fair bit about McLuhan’s famous aphorism lately, and I’ve decided it explains why I am, in a very literal sense, sick of Twitter. The point of McLuhan’s riff as I understand it isn’t that the content delivered by any given medium is irrelevant, but that the way in which any given…

  • The ghosts of infrastructures past

    Somewhere along Brindcliff Edge Road in Sheffield, you can still see this wonderful infrastructural relic: That’s a sewer-gas destructor lamp, of which there are maybe a dozen or so remaining in the city, though only a very few of them are a) undamaged, and b) still lit. Destructor lamps took a tricky infrastructural problem (the way…

  • Rhyme vs. Reason

    The why of my wanting you differs each time. (The wanting, returning, is always the same.) So strangle my reason and drown it in rhyme: to query the telos of love is a crime. (And I know there’s only one crook in the frame.) The why of my wanting you differs each time; this quiddity…

  • The Metamedium

    From a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Zielinski argues that what he calls “media” (a dense composite notion encompassing both discourse and its material supports) has vanished from the horizon because it is now ubiquitous.” Obviously I need to read the whole book to make this claim more solidly, but nonetheless: this…