Babbling Corpse

Author: Grafton Tanner
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782797602
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - "haunted." Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream "indie" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.

The Circle of the Snake

Author: Grafton Tanner
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178904023X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

Author: Grafton Tanner
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462544
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.

Ghosts of My Life

Author: Mark Fisher
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178279624X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

The Blue in the Air

Author: Marcello Carlin
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1846945968
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
A former widower whose life was saved by writing about music spends a year waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto and join him in London. While he waits he observes that the world is subtly changing and that music has played a key part in these changes. A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader. The Blue in the Air is a gesture of defiance from a tiny but meaningful tugboat of resistance. At a time when we are repeatedly encouraged for reasons of demographic convenience to believe that music can change nothing and mean nothing, this writer demonstrates comprehensively that for those who stay awake, alert and alive, music still retains the power to change the fabric of the air we choose to breathe.

The Palmer Hotel

Author: Rick Paulas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578948249
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
It is with great pleasure and tremendous gusto that our staff at The Palmer Hotel, the most haunted place in the world until its mysterious collapse in 2020, await your arrival. Inside each room is a person, or persons, who've checked in for the night, but none will be resting peacefully.

Slime Dynamics

Author: Ben Woodard
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780992483
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
Through speculative philosophy and lurid cultural objects, Slime Dynamics explores the muck of life as a darkly vitalistic substance.

Non Stop Inertia

Author: Ivor Southwood
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1846947839
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
A theoretical investigation into the culture of precarious work, digital consumption and personal flexibility, calling for a counter-discourse of resistance. ,

Weird Realism

Author: Graham Harman
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780999070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while Hölderlin's Caucasus gives way to Lovecraft's Antarctic mountains of madness.

The Weird and the Eerie

Author: Mark Fisher
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1910924393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
A noted cultural critic unearths the weird, the eerie, and the horrific in 20th-century culture through a wide range of literature, film, and music references—from H.P. Lovecraft and Daphne Du Maurier to Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan. What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? Two closely related but distinct modes, and each possesses its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown. In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the Weird and the Eerie. Featuring discussion of the works of: H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christopher Nolan.