Shock and Awe 2

Came across this review of Shock and Awe online and was reading it, nodding along and thinking 'this is rather perceptive' and then realised it was AI generated!

A glam icon obviously for his Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie much darker and more interesting than I had first imagined and great fun to write about in S+A.

Sometimes you get a bonanza - and so it with this Atlantic piece about the the new right-wing insult-trope of "theatre kid" "The White House assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, recently dismissed Senator Jon Ossoff as a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre…

"The scriptwriters obviously decided to introduce Natalie Harp to spice things up in season three of 'Trump.'

As powerful - and as political - as Spacemen 3's "Revolution" (Don't be too quick to understand that sentence) The Monkees perplex - when the results are as a pleasing and potent as the "real thing", does intent / content / context matter?

Strangely no mention of the Blondely Ambitious one in this piece about ambition in pop and "a certain monstrousness" of the popstar personality.

Here's an entry from The Biographical Dictionary of Film in which David Thomson rehearses some of the concerns about "movie" addressed in the new book A Sudden Flicker of Light: Fortuitously - but purely accidentally - timed for the tenacious Madonna's re…

David Thomson has a new book out, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which he convinces himself that the artform to which he has dedicated his entire life is actually corrupting civilisation and profoundly responsible for the c…

What tarts!

Some of this 1984-85 iD imagery is genuinely cool, really chic e.g. this one below Or just fun But some of it is a hot mess ' And some edges into Nathan Barley territory iD always had this thing of pushing style to a sort of jolie laide point - and then b…

Ever the performer, President Trump has lately been putting on a show of indifference. …..Beneath all that bluster and makeup, he’s sweating. - Frank Bruni The NYT sees itself not as a defender of journalistic principles or a champion of democratic values,

Is that bended knee meant to suggest an enormous deformed erection?

Hauteur Theory #1: Unfamiliarity breeds Contempt I thought I had heard everything - but the munificence of all the vintage Top of the Pops episodes on YouTube supplied surprise Here, in 1977, savagely behind the times, a group I never even heard of: a late

Hubert Parry: "in true folk-songs there is no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity" Folk is associated with naturalism - the idea that there is no artifice involved, no element of show.

Interesting reflections on the Robert Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s over at Michaelangelo Matos's substack Beat Connection Although he takes a poke or several at the Elmscentricity of the Bob universe ("has no problem tooting his horn") a…

Is this undignified, or just Donovan reclaiming the small debt that Bolan owed him?

Don't want to do any spoilers but this pettishly flirtatious encounter between Russell Harty and Adrian Street takes a dramatic turn...

Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations The Board of Peace might be destined to fail, but it still threatens to undermine an international system in which the U.S. was once the linchpin. - Ishaan Tharoor, New Yorker ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ and some trope detritus

Things have been too grim for me to do these posts, but then this one came along (the theater kids being the (mal-)administration, if that isn't obvious)

Interview by Javier Mattio for La Voz del Interior of Córdoba 1) The visual exhibitionism of glam rock reminds of social networks and Instagram (inevitably joke: instaglam).

There's an exhibition at the Design Museum in High Street Kensington dedicated to the New Romantics and the club scene of Blitz and Billy's and Le Beat Route.

I have noted here before the low regard for plastic in post-WW2 highbrow culture - which was transvaluated into a positive by Warhol and other Pop Artists, and in turn espoused by Bowie as an anti-authenticity riff (his Young Americans mode of "plastic so…

This piece by Rick Wilson on Trump’s desecration of the White House is limned with theatrical metaphor The East Wing Obscenity Trump's Ballroom Is a Tumor On The People's House There’s a way the light falls in the White House on Autumn afternoons in Washi…

From the NME 1974 Annual - which as is the wont of annuals, is really a survey of 1973.