Modernity, or post-modernity, or the difference, or whatever that thing we're in now is. Very precisely, very elegantly, theres an evocation of a stylized, graceful past, though the setting is nominally the present. A world of phone booths and opium dens, fedoras, travel agents, zippo lighters, Parisian cafes and London pubs populated by beautiful, sad eyed prostitutes where smoking indoors is always allowed. Cons where people still read mimeographed fanzines. Our world intrudes as a crude, pointless, painful, violent place, above all unbearably stupid. It's terrorism and the war thereon, but it's also seemingly ipods, porn and reality tv. The ambience is pre war, interwar, something, a distilled ambience of a place that still bears some dignity in the western collective imagination of the past, finally explicitely made so much fiction. Noir, detective stories, Casablanca. Fever dreams of trauma. Nice.
Datepalm
Modernity, or post-modernity, or the difference, or whatever that thing we're in now is. Very precisely, very elegantly, theres an evocation of a stylized, graceful past, though the setting is nominally the present. A world of phone booths and opium dens, fedoras, travel agents, zippo lighters, Parisian cafes and London pubs populated by beautiful, sad eyed prostitutes where smoking indoors is always allowed. Cons where people still read mimeographed fanzines. Our world intrudes as a crude, pointless, painful, violent place, above all unbearably stupid. It's terrorism and the war thereon, but it's also seemingly ipods, porn and reality tv. The ambience is pre war, interwar, something, a distilled ambience of a place that still bears some dignity in the western collective imagination of the past, finally explicitely made so much fiction. Noir, detective stories, Casablanca. Fever dreams of trauma. Nice.
Currently reading
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
Raising Steam
Lud-in-the-Mist
State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
Afghanistan
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History
