Don McLean’s American Pie was the 1971 song that everyone knows, but few know all the lyrics to. Except for my dad, who knew every word.
C. Scott Jordan
A truly heart-breaking display of the tragedy of the commons plays out on the centralised table displays of your local book shops and across the entirety of airport bookstores.
Repetition in music has been criticised time and again dating back to the late nineteenth century.
Climate change. Truly this is the fundamental struggle of our age, whether or not we are willing to accept it. Yet here I sit, before my laptop. My brain is racked. I am defeated. What more can I say of global warming that the healthily grown tome of postnormal times writing hasn’t already touched upon. What cleaver path remains uncharted?
Like a film, Afrofuturism itself began in sound – music. To this day, it still remains a staple of many black musicians, even if not as overt as in the case of Sun Ra.
It is such a strange word. Even by English standards. Swastika. This odd combination of consonants and vowels makes for something almost as startling as the symbol itself.
My seat was in Iraq. It sounded like as good a place as any for me to colonise my Made in the US of A posterior for the evening’s performance. I cannot believe this act of irony was the product of chance alone.
How do we navigate these turbulent postnormal times of contradictions, complexity and chaos, of uncertainty and ignorance? What values do we need to pilot our way to a sane and humane new paradigm?
A new distinct shadow is emerging within contemporary American film. This new other does not have a proper face so it cannot be furnished with appropriate make up, accent and other character tropes.
This is the age of superheroes. Hardly a month goes by without a new superhero flick. If cinema is the engine of empire, as Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies tell us in American Terminator, then a declining empire indicates that the engine itself is in serious trouble.