“The industry of the Absolute Fake gives a semblance of truth to the myth of immortality through the play of imitations and copies, and it achieves the presence of the divine in the presence of the natural –but the natural is ‘cultivated’ as in the Marinelands.”
Excerpt from essay “Travels in Hyperreality” by Umberto Eco, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1975.
Image: “Water & Oil,” photographed by Steven Meisel, model: Kristen McMenamy, image from theworldsbestever.com.
“No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.”
Excerpt from A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present by Frederic Jameson, New York, NY: Verso, 2002. Print.
Image: “Bruce,” still from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), image from chud.com
“The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is. Time is limitless, because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the same. Space is limitless because the artificial light obscures rather than defines its boundaries.”
Excerpt from Learning from Las Vegas (Revised Edition) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977. Print.
Image: Poster for Lady Gaga’s “The Monster Ball” tour; image from popdirt.com
“Empty space becomes both fertile and intimidating in modernist special effects, like an extension of Wagner’s blackened gulf between audience and the lit stage at Bayreuth. The blank and unobstructed suggest absence as presence. This exposure was an invitation to add more special effects. After World War II, these modernist spaces were filled very quickly. They were scripted to meet the consumer side of entertainment that continued to grow. Finally they became very busy scripts indeed, particularly after 1955.”
Excerpt from From the Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein, New York: The New Press, 2004. Print.
Video: Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989).
“This became the new plan: to make a one-hour program for the fourteen minutes of Thriller and an accompanying documentary on the making of what, to that point, would be the most expensive music video ever made, and to finance it by selling the broadcast rights to television. The obvious choice would have been to approach MTV, but MTV wasn’t used to paying for programming, and [John] Landis and his partners had a different exhibitor in mind. ‘Cable TV was just starting,” says Landis, “and we sold it to Showtime. It wasn’t enough money, but it was a lot of money, and as soon as we sold the right to premiere Thriller and Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller to Showtime, we got a hysterical call from MTV, saying, “You can’t do this to us!”
Excerpt from “The Transformation” by Jason Lapeyre, Wax Poetics, No. 37 Oct./Nov. 2009: 77-8. Print.
Image: MTV logo without “Music Television” and MTV logo with “Music Television.” Image from Rolling Stone.com
“There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft.”
Excerpt from “After the Massachusetts Massacre” by Frank Rich, New York Times 23 Jan 2010. Web.
Image: The Princess and the Frog (still), 2009. Image from New Orleans Museum of Art website.
“At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E is the quintessential twenty-first-century motion picture. Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, it’s the 2001 of 2008–a postphotographic film set in a posthuman universe.”
Excerpt from “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” by J. Hoberman, Artforum International Dec. 2009: 210-29. Print.
Image: Scott Hocking, Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.
“The ‘00s really began on December 12th, 2000, the day the Supreme Court blocked Florida from recounting ballots and anointed George W. Bush. Other bad days were to follow—most famously 9/11. But we never recovered from 12/12, spent the rest of the decade trying to forget it and mostly succeeded. Before you knew it, we were at the airport, waiting in line to take off our shoes. Why? Who knew? We just were.”
Excerpt from “A Decade of Lost Chances” by Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone Issue 1094/1095 December 24, 2009-January 7, 2010: 15-16. Print.
Image: Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980, silkscreen ink and diamond dust on paper. Image from Georgetown.edu
“You go to Las Vegas precisely because you want to be overwhelmed by an excessive visual ordeal. We define and describe spectacle by the use of superlatives, and Wynn tells you on his taped message that his paintings are the ‘most expensive’ and ‘the best.’ The Guggenheim’s advertising offers the viewer no less.”
Excerpt from In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle by William L. Fox, Reno/Las Vegas: University of Las Vegas Press, 2005. Print.
Image: Still from Avatar. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Image from silive.com
“Beckman, now fifty-six, has been hiding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, until recently, he has been serving donuts for seven dollars an hour. A look into his eyes will tell you what you already know: there isn’t a more punishing zero than the sugary naught of a Krispy Kreme Hot Original Glazed. And yet Beckman is emerging, and doing so in one of the worst economic climates of our times.”
Excerpt from “The Disappearance of Ford Beckman” by Michael Paul Mason, The Believer Nov./Dec. 2009: 29-34. Print.
Image: Rolling Stone Issue 1094/1095. December 24, 2009 – January 7, 2010. Cover concept by Chip Kidd; logo type by Jim Parkinson; design by Joseph Hutchinson. Image from Rolling Stone.com
