AltWeeklies Wire
21st Century Situationists
Framed inaccurately by the press, The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is best understood as a contemporary extension of the French Situationist movement of the ’60s, a mass inversion of rhetorical logic, meant to break the spectator’s passivity toward the spectacle and turn the obscuring force of mass media back on itself. Using pop cultural references and superficial Internet memes like the double-rainbow guy and “Hide ya kids, hide ya wife...” in the context of a once-powerful political forum was a Dadaist attempt to wipe the slate clean, to rise above the fruitless tit-for-tat schoolyard shouting match to which our political discourse has been reduced by the 24-hour news cycle and corporate spin-doctoring.
Accessibility's Rainbow: Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice'new
A mere three years after the infamously reclusive author released Against the Day, a 1,000-plus-page world’s fair of themes, characters and pastiched genres, Pynchon may have thrown us his strangest curveball yet by delivering a novel that is accessible, readable, and relatively short: that is, rather un-Pynchonesque.
Tags: Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
