Shovelware

Crowdsourcing My Next Book

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:13:30 -0500

Photographers:

A call for six (6) photos, to be reproduced in black and white, as illustrations in a forthcoming Brazilian (Portuguese-only) anthology of my work, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and the Sexual Symbolism of Madonna's Big Toe (Editora Sulina). The book will be launched at the prestigious Pernambuco book fair, FLIPORTO, in Olinda, Brazil, November 12-15. (Details HERE.)

I'm inviting interested parties to send a link to their online galleries or portfolios to me at markdery at verizon dot net.

Unsurprisingly, there won't be any clink of coin, here. (Is there ever, these days?) But if I choose your image as one of the six B/W illustrations in the book, or six of your works to fill all six slots, you'll receive written credit in the book, including a link to your site, and as many complimentary copies of the book (which, again, is Portuguese-only) as I can pry from the publishers' white-knuckled grip. As well, English-language rights to the book may be picked up by an American publisher, in which case I'll lobby strenuously to include your images in the English-language version.

What am I looking for? Any images that resonate with the sensibility at play in my writing. If you're unfamiliar with my work, prowl around my site, Shovelware, or read the Wikipedia entry on me, or search sites like True/Slant and Boing Boing.

For the time-deprived, here's the back-cover promo copy for I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. (Pardon the shamelessly self-aggrandizing tone. Flogging product is part of every hack's job description, these days.)

From the cultural critic Wired called "provocative and cuttingly humorous" comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful new collection of drive-by critiques---of an America gone mad, and a world where chaos and catastrophe are the new normal.
Here are essays on Star Trek fans' pornographic fantasies about the Borg, a fascist hive mind of alien man-machines; Facebook as a Limbo of the Lost for the dead souls from your high-school yearbook; George W. Bush's fear of his Inner Queer; the SUV as a totem of Ugly Americanism; the morality of wearing camo-themed fashion during wartime; why golf is a battlefield in the war between the classes; the homoerotic subtext of the Superbowl; the theme-parking of the Holocaust; the Church of Euthanasia; the hidden agendas of IQ tests; Santa's secret kinship with Satan; the sadism of dentists; why HAL, the computer in the movie 2001, was gay; the severed head as signifier; the literary merits of suicide notes; and, of course, the sexual symbolism of Madonna's big toe.
From Menckenesque polemics on American society to deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which the author turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual thrill ride.

I'll seriously consider any stunning image that harmonizes with the style and subject matter suggested by that blurb.

DEADLINE: MONDAY AM, NYC TIME.

To get you in the mood, here's the unforgettable front-cover photo by the incomparable Adam Szrotek, guaranteed to leave big, puffy blisters all over your mind:

On Leaving TRUE/SLANT

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:41:36 -0500

READ IT NOW, BEFORE IT'S REDACTED: "Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant."

TEASER:

The unspoken goal, in too much American journalism, is not to tell people what they don't know, or never even imagined they might want to know, but to tell people what they already know, since it logically follows that anything they don't know is too weird to survive in what we Americans, in our inimitably irony-free way, like to call the Marketplace of Ideas. It's this failure of editorial nerve, driven by a cringing fear of scaring off advertisers, that has rendered largely extinct the sort of narrative nonfiction Lawrence Weschler describes as "pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject, and through the sheer narrative energy of the writing, you'd find yourself becoming caught and then held, completely immersed, lost to the world for hours at a time..."
And one must tell people things they already know in language they already use---PowerPoint prose that is easily bullet-ized in the reader's mind. Like William F. Buckley, I never scrupled at sending my reader to the OED if a sesquipedalian word was the best word for the job. Nor did I feel any obligation to smilingly submit to the intellectual straitjacket that constrains too much American journalism, namely, the presumption that a writer's allusions and references should be bounded by the cultural literacy of Kim Kardashian.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES!

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:20:48 -0500

HELP WANTED

NEEDED: A webdesigner with some coding skills (Movable Type, Perl) OR a coder with some design literacy.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

1. Migrate the contents of my extensively built-out website (www.markdery.com) to a new, user-friendly, free-hosting platform such as WordPress, Blogger, MT, or Tumblr. (Your informed opinion on which platform is best will help determine which platform I choose.) Once you've designed the site architecture and flowed legacy content into it, I'll choose from among the available, off-the-shelf templates offered by the new host, but will likely need your help in customizing the generic design to suit specific layout and functionality concerns.

2. Move my domain name to same.

3. Optimize for search engines; notify all major engines of new site location.

PAY: To be negotiated. My budget for this is limited, but I'll seriously consider all reasonable estimates. This project would offer marvelous experience for a newly minted design or programming grad, not to mention an impressive addition to his/her portfolio.

CONTACT: Send a resume, cost estimate (broken down by task/expense), and projected time frame for completion of project to:

markdery at verizon dot net

NOTE: I'll be out of the office July 23-31, so if you send your resume and estimate between this Friday and July 31, please be aware that I'm off the grid.

Grandpa Goth: Mark Twain Shows His Dark Side

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:22:46 -0500

WEEKEND UPDATE: Apparently, some Bronze-Age bible troll reported my Facebook link to this essay as "abusive," presumably because Twain was an atheist and Huckleberry Finn, one of the most banned books in a nation that stinks to heaven of god-bothering, is the devil's handiwork. Now, due to Facebook's guilty-until-proven-innocent logic---a rule of thumb that wins the Idi Amin Dada Award for enlightened online governance---I'm unable to repost. Anything. Whether you like Twain or my work or not, I hope you'll consider reposting a link to this page on your Facebook page as a way of saying you support free speech. If that sounds like product placement, mea culpa maxima.

((YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Facebook appears to have repealed its ban on my links, at least for the moment, restoring the link to my article. Heartfelt thanks to all who stood with me in free-speech solidarity by reposting a link to this essay on their FB pages. Twain would be proud of you!

But I will be keeping a close eye on FB's thoughtcrime police, in the future, and will devote a post to the subject if merited. As I note in the TRUESLANT comment thread, it's a strange philosophy of community governance that accepts on faith the baseless accusations of self-appointed public morals czars, by which I mean: community members who, under cover of anonymity, bang the "ABUSE" button whenever they hear speech they don't like. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on them, not the other way 'round? I applaud FB's prompt repeal of their ill-advised gag order, but worry about a privatized commons where the worst among us, who seem to have all the passionate intensity (if not the facts) these days, are able to muzzle freethinkers with the click of a button.))

Grandpa Goth: the new unexpurgated autobiography reminds us how dark Twain could be. A new essay, at True/Slant; read it HERE.

Teaser:

That Twain the Sage of Pepperidge Farm is a sentimental caricature has been obvious since at least 1917, when Mencken published his thoughts on the subject in the New York Evening Mail. Twain had been in the ground only seven years, but already Mencken felt the need to set the record straight, inspired by the posthumous publication of books Twain had suppressed during his lifetime on the assumption that they would demolish, in one blow, his reputation as a lovable curmudgeon. Twain's misgivings were well-founded: The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? are sardonic meditations, respectively, on the hypocrisies and fatuities of religion and the moral depravity and brutish self-interest of the species. "Mark Twain dead is beginning to show far different and more brilliant colors than those he seemed to wear during life," writes Mencken, "and the one thing no sane critic would say of him today is that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters that he was once so widely thought to be."
The Twain rising from the grave on the centennial of his death lives up to Mencken's press---and just in time for our age of Tea Party know-nothings and bible-thumping flatheads, not to mention CEOs like Lloyd Blankenfeld of Goldman Sachs and Tony Hayward of BP, poster boys for unchecked corporate arrogance and greed.

A Walden of the Mind

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:52:49 -0500

But seriously: the debate about publicness is too important to be left to prophets of a great big beautiful tomorrow. Join the bloodsport, HERE.

PULLQUOTE:

Is the pervasive resistance to untethering ourselves from our social worlds or disconnecting ourselves from the media drip, even for an instant, at root a fear of the emptiness in our heads? What does it say about us, as a society, if we're unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is the girl in Deresiewicz's anecdote who wonders why anyone would want to be alone an outlier or a poster child for our times? If Deresiewicz is right, should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude---a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?

THE ANATOMICAL UNCONSCIOUS: LECTURE THIS FRIDAY AT THE OBSERVATORY (MORBID ANATOMY, BROOKLYN)

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:48:45 -0500

WHAT: An illustrated lecture with "cult author and cultural critic" Mark Dery (The "cult author" bit is my host's artful sobriquet, not mine!)

WHEN: This Friday, June 18th.

TIME: 8:00 PM.

ADMISSION: $7

LOCATION: Presented by Morbid Anatomy, at the ~~Proteus Gowanus gallery~~ Observatory at 543 Union Street (the large red brick building).

DIRECTIONS: SEE BELOW, AT END OF POST.

TITLE, SUBJECT: The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen.

What do 18th-century wax "anatomical Venuses" doing a striptease in which they expose their internal organs; cutaway views of the imaginary anatomy of Loony Tunes characters; the X-Ray Specs and Visible Woman toys familiar to boomers; and artist Wim Delvoye's X-rated X-rays of people performing sex acts have in common?
Mark Dery makes these and other provocative connections in his lecture "The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen," a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. In his hour-long lecture/slideshow, Dery will touch on the pornographic fantasies that swirled around the X-ray from its inception; adolescent dreams, fueled by comic-book ads for X-Ray Specs, of the potential uses for Superman's X-ray vision; current fears of the potential for abusive use of airport scanners that penetrate clothing; and the artist Wim Delvoye's series of pornographic X-rays.
He'll theorize the eros of anatomy revealed, with digressions into the weird cartoon subgenre of imaginary anatomies (of everything from Star Wars At-Ats to Loony Tunes characters) and the premonitions of X-rated X-rays inherent in the baroque medical mannequins on display at the Museum La Specola in Florence, Italy---wax Venuses whose uncanny seductions Dery reads as examples of the abject aesthetic he calls the Pathological Sublime.
Along the way, Dery will explore the idea of X-ray as metaphor for our socially networked Age of Oversharing, when the polarities of public and private are reversing themselves, and the Death of Shame prepares the way for End of Privacy and the Transparent Self, whose innermost thoughts (and bodily functions) must be Tweeted, Facebooked, and blogged.

Found on the Web; all rights reserved.
DIRECTIONS: OBSERVATORY is located at 543 Union Street at Nevins St., in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. The entrance is currently through Proteus Gowanus gallery, in the alley off Nevins St.
R or M train to Union Street in Brooklyn:
Walk two long blocks on Union (towards the Gowanus Canal) to Nevins Street. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on right. Go right on Nevins and left down alley through large black gates. Proteus Gowanus is the second door on the left.
F or G train to Carroll Street:
Walk one block to Union. Turn right, walk two long blocks on Union towards the Gowanus Canal, cross the bridge, take left on Nevins, go down the alley to Proteus Gowanus, the second door on the left.
MORE HERE.

This One Goes to 11: My Years as a Rock Hack, and Other Tales of Searing Shame

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:59:59 -0500

Rock's Back Pages, a mammoth, pay-per-view "exclusive archive of 50 years of rock 'n' roll history," ranging from articles to audio recordings of interviews, now offers (to paid subscribers, with a few freebies to bait the trap) some of my rockcrit and music journalism from the Early Years of Bitter Struggle.

My page is HERE.

Greatest Hits include stories on, or round-up features including, Laurie Anderson, Afrika Bambaataa, John Zorn, De La Soul, Negativland, Gary Lucas, Coldcut, The Cure, Digital Underground, Grandmaster Flash, Kraftwerk, Husker Du, The Orb, Sonic Youth, the unforgettable Sonny Sharrock, and the incomparable Shriekback (a personal favorite, whom I leapt at the chance to interview).

My statement, from the site:

"As a freelance music journalist in the '80s, I wrestled with the cognitive dissonance of writing critical essays for art magazines on highbrow subjects such as the video artist Nam June Paik, on one hand, and on the other grinding out music-journo hackwork like 'Hellbangers! Some Call It Black Metal; By Any Name, It's The Hard, Dark Underbelly Of Rock,' a story I wrote for the late, utterly unlamented Hard Rock Video magazine.
Through my interviews with artists and New Music composers in what was then called New York's 'downtown' scene, I discovered British cultural studies and French postmodern theory. Media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and scholars of fan cultures such as Dick Hebdige offered object lessons in the intellectual rewards of trespassing in the forbidden zone between academic theorizing and pop-culture headbanging. My interest in this sort of philosophical and stylistic cut 'n' mix had already been piqued by intellectually omnivorous music writers such as Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, and by the genre-hopping, quotation-crazy East Village composers, hip-hop deejays, and 'appropriation' artists I was writing about. Why couldn't I do, in rockcrit, what Laurie Anderson and John Zorn were doing in music? Nothing remained, I decided, but to attempt the experiment in gene-splicing cultural criticism I'd been inching toward.
Regrettably, most rock magazines, especially the gear-porn, guy-ocentric trade rags I was writing for, were deeply hostile to such post-disciplinary promiscuity. Which is why I abandoned music journalism for the arts-and-culture beat.
The articles archived here are early, misbegotten attempts at a post-Bangsian, gonzo-theory rockcrit---fossil specimens of evolutionary dead-ends. But most have some obscure charm that makes them worth a glance, at least: insights into the artistic unconscious of artists seldom covered by the mainstream press; stylistic loop-the-loops and theoretical bungee-jumps that actually work, on occasion; or, absent other merits, comic relief---not always intentional, to be sure, but isn't that the best kind?"

Always Connect

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:17:28 -0500

WHAT: "Have We No Sense of Decency, Sir, at Long Last?: On Adult Diapers, Erectile Dysfunction, and Other Joys of Oversharing."

My TRUE/SLANT essay on the Death of Shame, the Plague of Oversharing, and the Frenzy of Social Networking in the Age of Always Connect.

READ IT HERE.

NUT GRAF:

The totemic technologies of our times---the cellphone, the iPod, the Blackberry---are turning our psyches inside out, reversing the polarities of public and private. They make solitude portable, encapsulating the solipsistic self in a media bubble. More and more, we're alone in public, oblivious to the world around us. Thus the ubiquitous obscenity of couples sitting together in restaurants, each gazing vacantly into the middle distance as he or she brays into a phone, or of people unashamedly texting away in the midst of social gatherings or, even more scandalously, during movies, the screen's glow distracting everyone nearby. (A friend recently witnessed a scuffle between a compulsive texter and another moviegoer, who in a paroxysm of irritation snatched the woman's phone from her.) Yet more dramatic evidence of the growing tension between electronic solipsism in public spaces can be found in the ever more common phenomenon of the stranger with the headset, chattering blithely about her irritable bowel as she elbows past you at the supermarket meat counter, or---even more appallingly---the cellphone conversation floating out of a bathroom stall, punctuated by the unmistakable plop of a bowel movement in progress. (Is there a surer sign that Western civilization is in its terminal stages?)

Kraken Rising

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:33:31 -0500

WHAT: "Cthulhu said it, I believe it, that settles it." My H+ feature on the cephalopod meme, "Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot."

READ IT HERE.

NUT GRAF:

When the stars align, [H.P. Lovecraft's monstrous squid god] Cthulhu will rise again to resume His dominion over the Earth, ushering in an age of frenzied abandon. Humankind will be "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy"---Aleister Crowley's idea of Primal Scream therapy, maybe, or what Burning Man might look like if the Manson Family were called in as rebranding consultants.

As it happens, the many-tentacled One is rising these days, though less as an omen of apocalypse than as an emblem of the zeitgeist. The cephalopod---octopuses and squid, especially the giant squid, Architeuthis---has emerged, in recent years, as a tribal totem for geeks and hipsters of the Threadless T-shirt persuasion, celebrated in tattoos, skateboard decks, Gama-Go's Giant Squid messenger bag, the Colossal Squid onesie retailed by Hipster Baby Tees, artist Adam Wallacavage's tentacled chandeliers, Etsy seller OctopusMe's sterling-silver rings cast from actual tentacles, and let us not forget the Screaming Octopus Mini Vibrator or the insertable silicone Tentacle from Whipspider Rubberworks, a "g-spot stimulator" studded with glow-in-the-dark suction cups. (Both go well with tentacle hentai, the only-in-Japan cartoon-porn genre devoted to fantasies of wide-eyed Lolitas ravished by cephalopods).

Stoner Noir (Facebook of the Dead)

Sat, 29 May 2010 12:53:49 -0500

WHAT: A Boing Boing special feature, wittily designed by BB designer Rob Beschizza. READ IT HERE.

This, and the other mind-crushingly awesome images in this post, were created by the photographer Max Oppenheim and prosthetic artist Bill Turpin, based on the grotesque caricatures of '70s yearbook photos in Charles Burns's graphic-novel masterpiece, Black Hole. All rights reserved. (Found at The Operators' website.)

NO, REALLY, WHAT? My Cabinet essay, "(Face)Book of the Dead," vastly expanded for Boing Boing, with a bravura passage on what I call "stoner noir."

OKAY, I'LL BITE: WHAT'S "STONER NOIR"?

the '70s Southern California vibe that clings, like a low-lying fog of pot smoke, to my high-school memories. Anyone who spent her high-school years in that place, at that time, as I did, knows its youth culture was thick with the atmosphere I'll call stoner noir.
"Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described," writes Susan Sontag, in the self-consciously quotable opening line to "Notes on Camp." One of those unnamed things is stoner noir, a fugitive sensibility whose sun-bleached vacuity is infinitely more frightening than the long-shadowed bleakness of a Raymond Chandler novel. [...] The sludge-brained anomie of stoner noir is just what it looks like: the rudderless yawing of youth culture on the morning after the '60s. It's the numb realization that the tide that carried in the counterculture's utopian dreams and cries for social justice has ebbed away, leaving the windblown scum of Altamont and My Lai, the Manson murders and the Zodiac Killer. Stoner noir stares back at you with the awful emptiness of the black-hole eyes in a Smiley Face. Have a Nice Decade.

But stoner noir isn't just the burned-out roach of '60s youth culture. It's equally the toxic mental runoff of suburban sprawl: dirthead existentialism. It's the psychological miasma that hung, like the sweetly rotten reek of Thai stick, over adolescent psyches battered by divorce, lives dead-ended in high school, torpid afternoons bubbled away in a Journey to the Bottom of the Bong. Stoner noir is the default mindset of teenage wasteland: life seen through a glass pipe, darkly.

Tsar Trek

Mon, 24 May 2010 15:35:59 -0500

From Russia, with love:

The hardbound Russian translation of my 1996 classic of cybercrit, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, randomly illustrated with blurry, migraine-inducing black-and-white photos.

I can't vouch for the translation, since I don't read Russian. And I'm frankly a little nonplussed at the smoking hole in my front lawn left by the arrival, out of a cloudless sky, of this spaceborne time capsule from 1996.

But much of this book stands the test of time, by my lights, since it's cultural critique, rather than the geeked-out cheerleading that characterizes so many titles from that era, the Pre-Cambrian Explosion of Cyberhype.

Of course, Russian readers who've dreamed of taping their eyes into their sockets, strapping themselves into a Foucauldian centrifuge, and reading this thing in their own language will rejoice in the mere fact of its publication.

Stills from the Russian SF movie Planeta Bur (The Planet of Storms, 1959). Found on RETROFUTURE.

I have five (5) copies of this, the new Russian-language edition. I'm going to mail this slab of retro-futurist history FREE (except for shipping and handling charges, of course) to the first five readers who mail me at markdery AT verizon DOT net. ACT NOW, before the Crab Boys of Betelgeuse have their depraved way with your intake valves.

Pleased to Eat You

Sun, 23 May 2010 12:20:34 -0500

CULTURE:

NATURE:

Found online.

LIVE, NOW, AT TRUE/SLANT: "When Animals Attack!: On Gordon Grice's Deadly Kingdom"

READ IT HERE.

THE VITALS:

The unnatural acts of wild animals penned up in zoos, or forced to perform in theme parks and stage acts, or treated like family in peoples' homes, is a recurrent theme in Deadly Kingdom. We love nature best when it plays the romantic Other to human culture, just wild enough to remind us how far we've come from the primordial soup, but still respectful of the bullwhip, a contract that reaffirms our status as the apple of God's eye and the only primate with predator drones.
Walt Disney, the man whose name is synonymous with talking animals, robotic wildlife, and the theme-parking of the forest primeval, once remarked without a hint of irony, "I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess."
We dream of being part of an Edenic order where the lion lies down with the lamb: the paradise regained of Born Free, Free Willy, and moldy Disney chestnuts like Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar. Yet we insist, simultaneously, that we're not animals; rather, we're above nature, closer to God, at just the right altitude for Sarah Palin-style aerial wolf gunning.

Beer Hall Putz

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:31:41 -0500

Found on the Web.

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies.

HERE, at True/Slant.

Teaser:

The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler's day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube's decision to capitulate to the movie studio's takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them. In the world where mass culture has given way to microniche markets and the culture wars are dissolving the body politic into socially isolated demographic clusters, copyrighted narratives and trademarked characters---Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight---are the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society. Bruno Ganz gave Hitler life, but now he belongs to all of us, a psychopathic sock-puppet to be ventriloquized as needed.

Just Deconstruct

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:54:32 -0500

"How not dumb is Gaga?," asked the New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, in the first flush of Gagamania. Almost exactly a year later, his question still furrows the American brow. Okay, I'll bite: Not? As in: Not in the least not dumb?

READ the rest of my True/Slant essay on Lady Gaga, HERE.

TEASER:

Gaga isn't all that weird, despite her revisionist accounts of growing up feeling "like a freak," as she told Barbara Walters. Can we get some context, here? Performance artist Leigh Bowery giving himself an enema, onstage, and hosing the front rows at one of his performances with an anal geyser is weird. Painter and curiosa collector Joe Coleman adopting a pickled anencephalic fetus as his son and naming it Junior is weird. Faking your own hanging at the Video Music Awards because you "feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public, I can somehow cure my own legend" isn't weird; it's a time-tested career strategy, straight out of the shock-rock playbook. In his fame-crazed Ziggy days, Bowie worried---in a stage whisper, with all the eager microphones leaning in---about being assassinated onstage and, alternately, fantasizing about what it would do for his career. And the staged hanging was vintage Alice Cooper. Of course, we all know where Alice ended up: playing golf with Bob Hope.

Last Things

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:20:09 -0500

David Bowie, on bended knee, praying the Lord's Prayer at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness, Easter Monday, April 20, 1992, at Wembley Stadium in London, before a crowd of 72,000 and a live TV audience in 76 countries. "I felt as if I had been transported by the situation," Bowie remembers, in Marc Spitz's biography, Bowie. Queen guitarist Brian May later observed, "I remember thinking it would have been nice if he'd warned me about that."

"The Transfiguration of the Fanboy," the eighth and final installation of my "critical novella"---by which I mean: an amalgam of first-person essay, nonfiction narrative, critical theory, and theological argument---about a '70s Jesus Freak who switches saviors (from J.C. to Ziggy) in the 1970s, is live, at Religion Dispatches.

Read it HERE.

As I said on Facebook, if you've been following this epic essay, I'd love to hear your constructive---or deconstructive---critiques and comments in the discussion thread. With Religion Dispatches' blessing (for which I'm very much grateful), I tried something truly radical here, genre-splicing personal essay, biblical exegesis, social history, cultural critique, and something like the "theoretical fictions" Steven Shaviro essayed in his collection Doom Patrols.

I attempted to use my own pilgrim's progress as a prism to refract a moment in American religious history and pop culture, and to make sense of the distance between now and then, between the "conservative counterculture" (and relatively apolitical posture) of '70s charismatic Xtianity and today's religious right.

As important, I tried to think about the sympathetic vibrations between faith and fandom, and to ask why the liberatory heteroflexibility of '70s notions of masculinity has been rolled back, replaced by a more straitjacketed sense of manhood.

All of which is to say: if you've reading this thing, now's the time to shout "Amen!" Or scream blasphemy. Or whatever. Rattle my head with a sharply argued perception, and you just might make it into the book, if there is one. (File that under Hope Springs Eternal.)