PALE HORSES

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 […]

ENJOY THE SHOW

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: […]

NOUMENON / ICON

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 […]

ABSURDITY BITES

PARIJAH DIARIES 3 It’s the absurdity that bites. Children in social-distancing hats. Chalk squares on the playground. These slave masks. These gags. Social-distancing robots in the parks. Instructions to stand in the corners and face away from each other in lifts. The pettiness of bio-tyranny. The sheer reach of this insanity. The insistent tang of psy-op.  […]

THE DEATH OF GOD

‘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 […]

McLUHAN IN MANHATTAN

“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 […]

BAUDRILLARD at the BATACLAN

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 […]

BAUDRILLARD IN BRABANT

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 […]

BAUDRILLARD in BANGKOK

Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 Let’s try an analysis. I’ll take a subject close to home. Just up the street, in fact. Regard this beautiful woman. She is standing by the entrance to an entertainment plaza in a certain South-East Asian capital of some ten million souls. Or ten million […]

SEEING AND BELIEVING

  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 […]