This isn’t for the normies, I’ve given up trying to write for them. They don’t read me, anyway. So forget about persuasion. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you hear it too, the clatter of flying hooves: pale horses careering all over the place. This one was a street mural in Brixton, South London. This […]
TRUMP’S EAR, MAGIC TRICKS AND THE MYTH OF INFALLIBILITY All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 12 There was something else I was looking forward to when I came back to Jamrock — to put myself under the mushroom again. I’d been thinking about it for a while, up there on my parched plain in the North-East. I’d been in Isan more than a year already, working with Red […]
‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. Take, for example, the passage on religious iconography and the death of God, leading up to the stunning epigram: It is through the death of God that religions emerge. A beautiful sentence, dazzling in its […]
“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” — Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Baudrillard’s work is coolly psychedelic, giving us the same sense of dizzying replication that we love in doppelgänger stories and much science fiction. He was […]
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD “The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Jesse Hughes: I knew right then and there it was gonna be bad, and I knew that these kids had no idea what […]
THE MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In 1981 Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer […]
HANGING WITH THE HANGETSU Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it […]
I first noticed it in Amsterdam, relaxing in friend’s motorboat as we pottered around town and out into the countryside south of the city. All afternoon, lying back in the bow, I watched plane after plane laying down white trails in a blue sky — trails which twisted like ribbons, ruffled at the edges, spread […]
THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE In 1967, a book was published by Dial Press which purported to be the report of a secret government commission, leaked by one of its members. Entitled The Report from Iron Mountain – On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, the book exposes […]