In 2008 the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, recently winner of the Palm d`Or for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, participated in a campaign that was initialized to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Weerasethakul`s contribution was a four-minute segment called Mobile Men. In this segment …
‘The Rally to Restore Sanity’, held on October 30th in Washington D.C. was first announced back in September by Jon Stewart on his satirical ‘fake-news’ programme The Daily Show. Clearly intended as a response to extreme-right pundit Glenn Beck’s earlier ‘Restoring Honor Rally’, Stewart pitched the event as a protest against the hyperbolic and self-perpetuating nature of the media’s political discourse in the U.S., unfurling a banner behind him that urged viewers to “Take it Down a Notch, for America”. Immediately following the announcement, Stephen Colbert (an ex-Daily Show correspondent whose act consists of parodying the right by embodying its values ironically) announced a counter-rally on The Colbert Report: ‘The March to Keep Fear Alive’. Supposedly campaigning on the precise opposite of Stewart’s message, Colbert asserted, “Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom!”
Over the last few months, there has been much discussion online as well as at parties, galleries and conferences, about the meaning of the prefix meta- in metamodernism. Now, of course, each and everyone is free to define, re-appropriate and use it in any one fashion. Metamodernism as a term – but not as a …
A remarkable bit of television on the BBC last week. Embodiment of the postmodern Russell Brand no longer wants to be postmodern. He professes to yearn for something else, something beyond irony, eclecticism, mannerisms, and the cult of celebrity. Something “truthful”. Religious freak, metamodernist, or hypocrite? You decide. Revelation around 14th Minute.
In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker discuss the way in which metamodernism seems to be characterized by oscillation. As part of their deliberations on the concept of the metamodern, they invoke the words of German thinker Eric Voegelin to help explain the nature of this oscillation: Existence has …
He can’t be serious. James Franco has recently emerged from being an actor with a cult following (with roles in television and film ranging from Freaks and Geeks to Spider-Man to Eat, Pray, Love) to an artist that counts acting among his many other interests: Franco has seemingly become a super-charged, professional dilettante. After dropping …
